A Word On Guessing: Don’t.
“Remember not only to say the right thing in the right place, but, far more difficult still, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.”
- Benjamin Franklin
There’s another thing I need to clear up before we even start talking about taking specific SAT questions.
If you’ve ever been given any advice at all about how to take the SAT, it probably included this little pearl:
“If you ever get stumped on a question, just try to eliminate one or two answers and then guess from the rest.”
It’s the single most popular test-taking strategy of all time. Your friends have heard it. Every test prep company uses it. Your guidance counselors might have told you about it. Even the College Board tells you to do it. And as it turns out, it’s an absolutely awful piece of advice in almost every case. Let’s take a closer look at it.
First Things First: Guessing Defined
Before we can talk about why guessing on the SAT is bad, we have to make sure we’re talking about the same thing when we use the word guessing. When we talk about guessing, we’re talking about marking an answer choice on a multiple-choice question without being certain that the answer choice is correct.
We’re NOT necessarily talking about marking an answer choice when we don’t know the meaning of every word in the question, when we don’t know what a sentence says, when we’re not sure of the grammar, when we don’t know for certain how to do the math involved, or anything like that.
Can you see the difference? Natural test-takers encounter things they don’t know or have never heard of every time they take the SAT. It’s totally normal. In fact, in a lot of ways it’s inevitable. But if you know the test (and you will know it if you’ve studied this manual), you can still choose the correct answer choice reliably EVEN THOUGH YOU DON’T KNOW EVERYTHING IN THE QUESTION. In this case, for our purposes, you are NOT guessing—guessing only happens when you’re not sure the answer you’re marking is right. For our purposes, guessing has nothing to do with whether you understand the question you’re being asked, and everything to do with whether you’re certain the answer you mark is correct.
It’s very important that you understand this distinction before we continue the discussion; otherwise, you might think I’m telling you to give up whenever you come to a question you don’t understand fully, which is absolutely NOT what I’m telling you to do.
Now that we’ve got that straightened out, let’s talk about why people guess on the SAT in the first place.
The Argument For Guessing
The argument for guessing on the SAT relies on the way the test is designed. As you may know, you get a single raw point for every correct answer to a multiple-choice question on the SAT. You lose a fraction of a raw point for each wrong answer to a multiple-choice question. This fractional loss is set up so that if you guess randomly on every single question on the test, you should come out with a total score of 0 raw points.
How can that be? Well, for a five-answer multiple-choice question, you’ll get a full raw point if you’re correct and you’ll lose a quarter of a raw point if you’re wrong. So if you guess randomly, in any five questions with five answers each, you should expect to get one correct answer and four incorrect answers—which would come out to a net score of 0 raw points.
The argument for guessing tries to change those odds. According to the guessing theory, if you could remove one or two answer choices from each question, and then guess randomly from what you had left, you should expect to beat the test and get a few extra raw points. The thinking works like this: If you can remove two answer choices for each question, then you should only really be guessing from three answer choices on each five-answer question. If you guess from three answer choices, you should be right every third time (instead of only being right every fifth time, which is what you would expect if you didn’t remove any answer choices at all). But you’ll still only be penalized one-fourth of a raw point for being wrong. Over time, if you guess correctly every three tries and you’re only penalized as though you were guessing correctly every fifth time, you should come out significantly ahead.
If you’ve done other SAT prep before, you’ve probably heard this argument before. You might even be nodding in agreement. It’s simple probability, right?
Wrong.
This is an example of what you might call “over-simplified” probability. The argument for guessing on the SAT assumes at least two things that just aren’t true in real life.