<p>Can anyone give me a logical reason to omit any answers on the SAT? My counselors recommend it, but my "reasoning" skills tell me otherwise.</p>
<p>A monkey types on a keyboard. He has 40 questions, each with 5 answer choices. If he omits them all, he gets 0 points. If he answers them all, he gets 1 point for correct and 1/4 incorrect. If he answers them all, the most likely scenario is that he gets 8 questions right, and 32 wrong. That also yields a net score of 0. </p>
<p>Granted we are not monkeys. Our chance of getting something right is almost always going to beat the odds. </p>
<p>For reading:
You didn't have time to read the passage, but can deduce that one of the answers is extreme or does not meet up with the topic sentence of the first paragraph. </p>
<p>For math:
You don't know the size of the angle, but you know it obtuse.</p>
<p>Writing:
That one answer just sounds really ****ty. </p>
<p>The only reason why to omit anything is a complete lack of time, where filling them in would not necessarily benefit you. But if I were given 5 minutes on my test with half of it left, I would still answer ALL questions possible.</p>
<p>i omit if i have no idea what it's talking about.. haha it doesn't happen too often but there was a few. and on really hard math questions , i sometimes omit too. (i'm bad at math)</p>
<p>Because when you get something wrong on a guess, you lose 0.25 of a point, which can be costly.</p>
<p>If you have no idea of an answer, you would be stupid to guess, on the contrary.
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Actually no it wouldn't. You're under the false impression that omitting the question accounts nothing when it happens. The reality is that is accounts for 80% of the possible 1.25 marked off. </p>
<p>Do the math out. You have 5 questions. You randomly guess on 5, you get 1/5 right, 4 wrong, which yields 0. But unless you both are suggesting that both of you are as incompetent as a monkey is, your guess had better be better than none.</p>
<p>because the SAT is full of traps and if you're not absolutely sure of what you are doing, you will almost always guess the wrong answers?
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So according to this logic... your answers would be WORSE than a monkey? Because a monkey would not have the intellect to fall into those traps?</p>
<p>I'll be frank. If you can't eliminate at least ONE answer in ANY question in CR or Writing, you won't be scoring over 1800 anyways.</p>
<p>i totally agree with thequestionmark. my tutor said the exact same thing. the 1/4 point off scares people, but actually, guessing doesnt hurt you at all. </p>
<p>In 5 questions, the odds are you are going to guess one question right when you randomly fill in bubbles. thats +1. the other 4 questions u get wrong are going to be -1/4 each. thats -1. total=0, which is the same as omitting all of the questions. </p>
<p>so in conclusion, (still thinking in sat essay mode^.^) if you can eliminate one answer choice, the odds are already with you. and in randomly guessing, the odds are never against you.</p>
<p>Actually ,the ods are not against you,but they are not with you.
If you guess 20 questions ,you are supposed to get 4 correct and 16 incorrect.
This is a raw score of ZERO !!
How many points do we get for a raw score of ZERO ?</p>
<p>Actually ,the ods are not against you,but they are not with you.
If you guess 20 questions ,you are supposed to get 4 correct and 16 incorrect.
This is a raw score of ZERO !!
How many points do we get for a raw score of ZERO ?
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If a monkey guesses on 20 questions, he might get 4 correct.</p>
<p>If you guess on 20 questions, you'd get 4? I'd certainly hope not. </p>
<p>Let's face it here... if you can't eliminate ANY answers, your gut feeling will be always slightly better than 1/5.</p>
<p>
[quote]
So according to this logic... your answers would be WORSE than a monkey? Because a monkey would not have the intellect to fall into those traps?</p>
<p>I'll be frank. If you can't eliminate at least ONE answer in ANY question in CR or Writing, you won't be scoring over 1800 anyways.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>First of all, nobody's a monkey. Second of all, I got a 2150. </p>
<p>Third of all, it's not about elimination of choices. There are cases where POE is good, but you can't use it as a crutch. Most (if not all) of the time, you go into a question that you don't know thinking that you sort of understand a few of the underlying concepts. The ETS relies on this. The purposely put trap answers into their questions so that people who "guess" get the question wrong. Let's be honest here, when was the last time that you actually unbiasedly picked a answer through POE? the answer is probably none. Most people tend to have a bias toward a particular answer, and that answer that our mind thinks is right, most of the time is wrong. </p>
<p>What I'm trying to say is that POE should not be a big part of your SAT strategy. There is no substitute to understanding the underlying concept.</p>
<p>The monkey is not always going to get 8 correct. Lol :]
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This is why you probably failed at the critical reading section. If it's not stated, you can't extrapolate the extreme. </p>
<p>Secondly, POE is used when the underlying knowledge is missing.</p>
<p>Omitting a multiple choice answer makes sense in two (possibly overlapping) scenarios: you have no time to even look at a question, or you've read the question and still you can't eliminate any of the answers.</p>
<p>ahntimmy scored 2300+. I'd be careful before you talk smack :)</p>
<p>One more point I want to make. If you go into a question not understanding the concepts completely, it is very possible to eliminate the correct answer. And I don't care what type of monkey you are, if you are choosing among wrong answers, you're not getting the question right. :)</p>