But the second way to prove that guessing is a bad idea is much better, and much more relevant to you as an individual. Just take a sample test from the College Board publication The Official SAT Study Guide, and make a note on your answer sheet every time you mark an answer you’re not sure of. Then, when you add up your score, calculate it first with all the questions included, and then compare that result to the score you would have received if you had omitted the questions where you weren’t sure of the answers. You will almost certainly find that your score is higher when you omit the questions you guessed on.
If this is NOT what you find, there are two possible reasons. It might be that you’re one of the few people on Earth who actually guesses well using the classical strategy, in which case you should count yourself lucky and write a thank-you letter to the College Board. The more likely explanation is that you’re still scoring lower than you want to, and you haven’t spent enough time with the processes and strategies in this book for them to make a difference in your score—you haven’t spent enough time to develop a real sense of certainty about when you’re right and when you’re guessing. As you’ll see, the higher your score goes, the less guessing you’ll find that you do. People simply don’t guess their way into a top score on the SAT.
The Origins Of Traditional Guessing
So if the traditional guessing strategy is such a flawed idea, where did it come from? Good question. There are two probable explanations.
First, major test prep companies need a piece of fall-back advice they can give to their students, and this must seem like a pretty good one. With this one strategy, even a person who had learned nothing at all from an 8-week class could feel empowered to tackle any SAT question and stand a decent chance of improving his score. And since the major test prep companies write their own practice questions, they can construct those questions so that certain answer choices are obviously incorrect—which isn’t how real SAT questions are written, but who’ll ever notice?
Second, the College Board itself must have a stake in perpetuating the traditional guessing approach. It’s been a part of their official advice for years now. But let’s think for a moment—in 2004 and 2005, the College Board came under heavy fire for the SAT and made several large-scale changes to the old version of the test. They cut out whole question types, added an entire section, changed the essay instrument from the old SAT Writing II essay, and added new content to the Math section, among other things. They did these things mostly because some colleges and universities complained about the old test design and what it showed (or didn’t show) about a student’s abilities. Now, we can be pretty sure that if there had been a problem with students guessing their way to higher scores, the College Board would have addressed the situation during its latest major overhaul. They didn’t. If the College Board knew about the guessing strategy, and if that strategy worked so well, why didn’t they change the test to make it impossible? And while we’re at it, why do they keep telling people to use it? I’ll leave the answers up to you.
Conclusion
Guessing on the SAT is almost certainly a losing proposition for you. Test it out and see for yourself. The best thing to do when you come to a question you can’t answer is to skip it. I know it’s hard, but it sure beats losing points!
(For more on knowing when to skip an answer, see the article called “No Two Ways About It” in this manual.)
Remember that “guessing” only refers to the act of marking an answer when you’re not sure that the answer is correct. On the SAT, there are ways to know your answer is correct even when you don’t completely understand the question. Marking an answer choice in that situation isn’t guessing—it’s smart, natural test-taking!
The Importance Of Details: Avoiding “Careless Errors”
“You will make all kinds of mistakes; but as long as you are generous and true, and also fierce, you cannot hurt the world or even seriously distress her.”
- Winston Churchill
As you go through the test-taking strategies in this Black Book, one thing will become very clear to you: at every turn, the SAT is obsessed with details in a way that high school and college courses typically are not.
The correct answer to an SAT Critical Reading question might rely on the subtle difference between the words “unique” and “rare.” A 10-word answer choice in an SAT Writing question might be right or wrong because of a single comma. An SAT Math question involving algebra and fractions might have the reciprocal and the complement of the correct answer as two of the incorrect answers. And so on.