The Dreaded Guessing Penalty
Having just written an article discussing skipping strategies in terms of how different standardized tests are curved, it seems like a good time to go into more detail on a generalized strategy for skipping vs. guessing.
First things first: it’s important to note the difference between a wrong-answer penalty and a guessing penalty. Most students (and many tutors) use them interchangeably, but I think of them as being somewhat different.
The wrong-answer penalty is the penalty that a test assesses for each wrong answer you submit. The guessing penalty is the overall amount by which your score will drop if you employ a random-guessing strategy on the whole test.
Most tests that do have a wrong-answer penalty don’t have a guessing penalty. The test-makers arrange the wrong-answer penalty so that randomly guessing on the test will neither help you nor hurt you.
Here’s an illustration of what I mean (note that I’ve also discussed this on the Abacus podcast): if you guess randomly on 100 questions that each have 5 answer choices, you will most likely get 1/5 of the questions right and the rest wrong. If the test has no wrong-answer penalty, your score is 20, because the wrong answers don’t affect your score. Tests that have a wrong-answer penalty and five answer choices per question will usually have a penalty of one-quarter of a point — examples of this are the SAT and the SSAT. In that case, your score is the number of right answers minus one-quarter the number of wrong answers. In this case, that’s 20 – (1/4) × 80, which is 20 – 20, which is zero.
So, randomly guessing on a test like the SAT or the SSAT generally means that you end up with zero extra points. That’s why most tutors advise you not to randomly guess: not because it hurts your score (it doesn’t, i.e., there’s no guessing penalty), but because it takes time to guess and that’s time wasted not helping yourself.
Of course, if you can eliminate answers that you know are wrong and improve your odds, you’ll end up with a slight addition to your points by strategic guessing. Which is why the general rule of thumb is: if you can eliminate even one wrong answer, you should guess. If you can’t eliminate anything and there’s a wrong-answer penalty, leave it blank and spend your time on other questions.
And, of course, if there’s no wrong-answer penalty, don’t hesitate to guess!