The SAT’s so-called “guessing penalty” may not be a penalty for some—but for others, guessing might be holding their score back. So when should you guess on the SAT, and what should you expect to happen when you do?
When to Skip a Question on the SAT
If you know absolutely nothing about the question, skip it.
If your score report comes back and you’re missing more than 8 questions, chances are you’re guessing too haphazardly. Try skipping a few more difficult questions.
When to Guess on an SAT Question
Learning more about how the SAT is scored will help you decide when it makes sense to guess.
For every question you get right, you earn a point. For every question you get wrong, you lose a quarter of a point. This method is used to calculate you raw score, which is then scaled out of 800 points. This means that guessing out of five answer choices has a pretty low chance of doing you any good—in fact, it’s 80% likely to harm you.
If you’re able to intelligently eliminate 3 answer choices, however, you’re in a different situation altogether. Now you’ve got a 50/50 shot of gaining a point or losing a quarter of a point. That’s like a coin toss where you stand to gain $100 with heads and lose just $25 with tails. It’s a bit like Pascal’s wager. What you stand to gain is so much more than what you stand to lose, so this is a very smart bet to take, especially because it’s a bet that’s likely to repeat itself.
What is Intelligent Elimination?
Intelligent elimination involves using what you do know about a question to justify eliminating certain answers. For example, a downward slanting line must have a negative slope, so if the question wants you to calculate the slope of the line, you can safely eliminate all of the positive answer choices. In the Critical Reading vocabulary sentence completion section, you might know the meaning of 3 of 5 answer choices, but remain stuck between two unfamiliar words. In the Writing error identification section, you might judge three choices to be grammatically correct, but be torn between an awkward idiom and the “No Error” choice.
All of these scenarios warrant guessing. But ONLY guess when you’ve intelligently eliminated 3 answer choices, leaving you a 50/50 shot of gaining a point or losing a quarter of a point.
Remember: For those that want a perfect 2400, skipping questions is only possible on the Critical Reading section—and even then, you can only skip a few. For others, whose target scores may be 600 to 700, guessing without eliminating 3 answer choices is destined to harm you!
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Additional Resources:
Conquer SAT Vocabulary Video Course