<p>I dunno about you people, but most of the time you can easily eliminate 2 answers giving you a 1/3 shot of getting it right. IMO and from what ive seen you dont omit unless you seriously have no clue what to do i.e a math problem. Critical reading you can determine from the context/and or from skimming a paragraph what to instantly eliminate as choices.</p>
<p>ugh, thank you for this! NO ONE i talk to understands. <em>sigh</em> their loss.
:D</p>
<p>It actually does help. I dont remember what the exact numbers were, but i remember i had more answers right in a section on the PSAT i took last year than that of my friend, but she had a higher score. It was because she omitted a lot of answers and got i believe none of the questions wrong while i omitted none of them.</p>
<p>here's my $0.02:</p>
<p>if you are aiming for a 2200+: you can't afford to omit anything
if you are aiming for anything less than 2200, then omitting can be beneficial to your score assuming it is done intelligently.</p>
<p>Well said!</p>
<p>Lol! You guys are talking about odds and everything. but those are just that. Odds!! take a person like me. Everytime I manage to eliminate 3 options out of 5, I try to make a guess, what PR calls an educated guess. Well, my luck never favours me. I always manage to guess wrong and so I always find it beneficial to not guess. For me anyway.</p>
<p>Is it really worth taking on risk for a probable reward of zero? When you can't eliminate any answer choices, that's the likely scenario. Sure there's margin of error, which means you might end up with a slight gain, but you're just as likely to end up with a loss. As I always say, SAT points are not for gambling with.</p>
<p>Let's say we eliminate one answer choice, improving the probability to 1/4. At that rate, we'll likely end up with 3 incorrect for every 1 correct answer.</p>
<p>That amounts to a net gain of +0.25 points. So I say, in this situation use your own discretion. If you feel confident about a given question and you eliminate one answer choice, go for it. If you can eliminate the one choice but still feel iffy about the others, don't answer. It can go either way IMO.</p>
<p>But as another poster mentioned, eliminating answers can be a tricky thing. Collegeboard, whatever you may think of them, are not dumb nor are they particularly kind. Wrong answer choices are usually engineered to be deliberately misleading. </p>
<p>So we must condition ourselves to ONLY eliminate an answer choice when we're 99.99% certain it's not the correct one. That's the real challenge. If you are careless and casual about eliminating answer choices, you often end up eliminating the correct one and all that probability stuff flies out the window. </p>
<p>There's a wrong answer penalty for a reason. Think about it, on most SATs you can omit a couple questions and still earn a "perfect" score. That should be proof enough that there is value in omitting questions when it's appropriate.</p>
<p>If you are certain that you've answered all but one or two questions correctly, then I believe that guessing on the last one or two is completely free:</p>
<p>Suppose that a perfect raw score is 80. You are certain of all but one question. If you omit it, you'll have a raw score of 79. If you answer it, you have some non-zero chance of getting it right (maybe less than 1/5, due to distractors, but still . . . ). If you are wrong, your raw score becomes 78.75, prior to rounding. But, as I understand it, CB rounds to the nearest integer before converting to the score on the 200-800 scale. So you'll have a 79. It appears to be a can't-lose, might-win scenario.</p>
<p>Similarly, if you are certain of all but two, and you omit them, you'll have a raw score of 78. If you answer, but you are wrong on both, you'll have 77.50, and it rounds to 78. Again, can't-lose, might-win.</p>
<p>This assumes that CB does round to an integer before converting to the 200-800 scale. I think that's the case, but the people on this forum would probably have enough data on # right, wrong, and omitted and resulting score for specific testing dates to check that out. The practice books all have you rounding to an integer before converting to the scaled score, and I think that happens with the PSAT also. (But tokenadult did once post a link to a CB publication that left this issue somewhat ambiguous for the SAT.)</p>
<p>Once you reach 3 that you are uncertain about, the deduction for wrong answers starts to matter, in the sense that guessing is no longer "free."</p>
<p>While it is usually wise to answer as many questions as possible, "blind guessing" can really hurt you, especially on the hard questions. For a question to be considered "hard" it means around 90% of people get it wrong (according to PR), so leaving it blank may be the better option, especially because you may eliminate the correct answer.</p>
<p>
[quote]
If he answers them all, the most likely scenario is that he gets 8 questions right, and 32 wrong.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Someone needs to brush up on probabilities.</p>
<p>i omit questions because i am really BAD at guessing. i hardly ever guess correctly, esp when down to two answer choices</p>
<p>Here's the trick: guess the answer, but bubble in the remaining one! lol</p>
<p>it's risky (:</p>
<p>@Elvy
Exactly! There was this absolutely difficult talent test that I took. There were 90 questions. I worked out 48 questions and I made educated guesses on the remaining 42. (There are no penalties for guessing). My score was 48!!!! All the questions that I had guessed on were wrong.</p>
<p>I've been tutoring SAT math for more than 20 years. Here's what I tell everyone:</p>
<p>Once you have spent time on a math question, ANSWER IT! And don't worry about whether you have eliminated one, two or ANY answers. You have already invested time. </p>
<p>On the other hand, by the time you take the SAT, you should have done enough practice to know your own range. If you are finding it necessary to guess more than a small handful of times, then you are going to fast and answering more questions than you should. It's like a line from an old Clint Eastwood movie: A good man knows his limitations...</p>
<p>^Terrible advice. Math is the worst section to guess on, unless there is a standard that you can rely on for that question.</p>
<p>I'm not saying to go through guessing haphazardly. I'm saying that if you have prepared thoroughly and you are going at the right pace, attempting questions that match your reasonable score goal, you should only have to guess two or three times for the whole test. But on those occasions, having already spent time that you cannot get back, you should just answer the question.</p>
<p>It's not a matter of time. It's a matter of whether you understand the question or not. If you spent 2-3 minutes on a question but still don't understand the underlying concepts, you will still most likely get the question wrong. In the end, that time is a sunk cost. Just skip and move on.</p>
<p>only guess if you can eliminate 3 of the 5 answers. a 50:50 chance is worth the .25, any more than that and you clearly don't have a clue and should stay away from the question. understand that for each question, especially for math, the collegeboard creates the wrong answers based on what they expect you to guess. if you are unable to elinate 3 answers, you are unprepared in that area and are susceptible to the collegeboard's traps.</p>
<p>
[quote]
I've been tutoring SAT math for more than 20 years. Here's what I tell everyone:</p>
<p>Once you have spent time on a math question, ANSWER IT! And don't worry about whether you have eliminated one, two or ANY answers. You have already invested time.</p>
<p>On the other hand, by the time you take the SAT, you should have done enough practice to know your own range. If you are finding it necessary to guess more than a small handful of times, then you are going to fast and answering more questions than you should. It's like a line from an old Clint Eastwood movie: A good man knows his limitations...
[/quote]
really bad advice! scary that you tutor people :(. if someone spent 5 minutes on the last question on a math section and ran out of time, id say 90% of the time they'd be wrong if they just guessed. they'd guess what CB wants them to, one of the 4 incorrect answers.</p>
<p>
[quote]
i omit questions because i am really BAD at guessing. i hardly ever guess correctly, esp when down to two answer choices
[/quote]
when i run into problems like this, i determine how difficult the question should be based on problem #, and go from there. it really helps thinking like you're making the test, u gotta dissect the other answer. if it's a math question then its even easier.</p>
<p>But you have to think: how is it that someone gets to the last question with 5 minutes left to work on that problem?</p>
<p>It's one of two possibilities --</p>
<ol>
<li>They went way too fast and skipped too many easier questions (because they were told not to spend too much time). This kid should not be guessing on this question -- he should not even be reading it!<br></li>
</ol>
<p>OR</p>
<ol>
<li> They are very strong math students and they finished early. A student who can get to the last problem with that kind of time to spare is NOT clueless. The time they spend will give them better than a random chance and they do not have many wrong answers anyway.</li>
</ol>