What About Grid-In Questions?
Many students wonder if the Student-Produced Response questions (or “grid-in” questions) require a different approach from the multiple-choice questions. For the most part, the Math Path process that we just discussed is the process I would follow for the grid-in questions (with the obvious exception that we won’t have any answer choices to consider in deciding how to attack the question.
There are a few special considerations we should keep in mind for the grid-in questions, though.
If The Question Refers To The Possibility Of Multiple Solutions, Make Sure You Understand Why
The grid-in format allows the College Board to ask more open-ended math questions, which is one of the reasons it exists on the SAT in the first place. So be aware that you might see questions that offer more than one valid solution. Such a question will often use a phrase like “one possible value,” as in, “If X has a value between 3.9 and 4, what is one possible value of X?”
If you realize that you’re dealing with a question that refers to the possibility of more than one valid response, make sure you can figure out why. In other words, if you can only think of one possible answer for such a question, then you’ve probably misunderstood it in some fundamental way, and there’s a very good chance that the answer you’re thinking of is wrong.
I’m not saying that you actually need to work out more than one solution in order to know that you’ve got the question right; I’m just saying that you need to understand where other solutions might come from. For instance, in the hypothetical question I just mentioned, you might say, “I know that 3.91 is between 3.9 and 4, and I know they used the phrase ‘one possible value’ because there’s an infinite number of numbers between any two numbers.” You wouldn’t necessarily have to work out that 3.92 and 3.93 are also valid solutions in order to be certain you understood the question correctly.
Don’t Be Afraid To Guess, But Don’t Expect Much To Come Of It
You aren’t penalized for missing a grid-in question, so you should never leave a grid-in question blank. On the other hand, since there are thousands of possible ways to fill out the answer grid for each question, the chance of guessing right is extremely small—which is why they don’t penalize you in the first place.
If you do decide to guess on a grid-in question, make that decision as quickly as you can so that you don’t waste any more time on the question than necessary. I would recommend guessing either 0 or 1, if those answers seem like they have any chance of being correct, just because I feel like I see those answers appearing more frequently than any other individual number. But the advantage of that, if there even is one, is extremely slight, and your chance of being correct on a random guess is basically zero anyway.
The Last 2 or 3 Questions Might Seem Extra Weird
We’ll often find that the strangest questions on the whole SAT Math section appear as questions 16, 17, and/or 18 on the grid-in section. We won’t always find exceptionally weird questions in these positions, but if there are going to be exceptionally weird math questions on a particular test, this is probably where they’ll appear.
These questions must still follow the same rules and patterns that the rest of the test follows—they still can’t involve trigonometry, for instance, and they must still be answerable in under 30 seconds and without a calculator. It’s just that sometimes they seem noticeably weirder than other questions on the SAT Math section.
Unfortunately, simply knowing that this might happen doesn’t do much to help us answer these questions. I just wanted to mention that we sometimes see extremely strange questions in these positions so that you know to look out for them, and so that you don’t think the test is suddenly changing dramatically and begin to doubt yourself.
Conclusion
We’ve just discussed a few special considerations for the grid-in questions, but remember that we want to approach them in basically the same way we would approach any other SAT Math question: by reading carefully, paying attention to details, thinking about which areas of math might be involved, looking for the simplest possible solution, and so on.
Sometimes You Can’t Solve For Every Variable
We’ve seen several examples of the way the College Board likes to make questions more challenging by handling things differently from the way they’re handled in school. One of the best examples of this is the way the test sometimes asks questions that involve multiple variables.
In school, if you have a question that involves four variables, you’re usually supposed to figure out the individual values of each variable. But the SAT often asks questions in which it’s unnecessary—or even impossible—to work out values for individual variables.