<p>i don't understand why the SAT penalizes the students for trying to answer all of the questions (especially those who are high scorers). I mean, it takes ALOT more effort to search back through a passage or to finish a math problem to pick and answer than just to leave it blank. right??
and obviously, for the high scorers, it is a rule that you never omit questions.
i mean, if you miss like....2 questions on math or something, you missed 2 questions regardless of whether u left one blank!! and it's soo unfair that if that wrong answer happens to be left blank, your score gets bumped up like 20 pts.
this guessing penalty does not make sense to me.</p>
<p>If they didn’t have the penalty, I would have gained 4 or5 more points on the test, which is like 50-70 points…</p>
<p>don’t think of it as a penalty on guessing, think of it as a score adjustment for random chance.</p>
<p>also if they took out the guessing then everyone’s score would go up, and the curve would make everyone’s score the same.</p>
<p>I think there shouldnt be penalty in CR - it is hard enough eo eliminated 3 very attractive answers and when the remaining 2 seem basically the same ,and you answer choose the wrong one ,you get -0.25 points .This is unfair.There MUST be a guessing penalty in Math (even -0.5) because students that are good at math answer the question without even viewing the answer choices</p>
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<p>I agree. If you think about it, approximately a million+ students take the SAT. If some student were lucky enough to get a 2100+ by only guessing, it would invalidate the 2100 achieved by other students who actually did try.</p>
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at that point why not just be a professional lottery winner and not bother going to college. odds are about the same.</p>
<p>It doesnt work like this.If you are astute enough to eliminate 3 answer choices and it is a 50-50 guess ,I dont see why this should be considered wrong.If you answer incorrectly ,you will lose 0.25 points just like every dolt who didnt even read the passage .
On the other hand ,it is impossible to get a 2100 if you guess all the time.The probabilty that you will answer a question correctly is 1/5 ,the probabilty you will answer about 140 MQ correctly for a 2100 is like (1/5)^140 Is this possible ?I dont think so.
SO,this guessing penalty turns out to impede the high scorers</p>
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I think I read somewhere that you ended up with a pretty good SAT score (2200+ or something). I’m curious as to how someone with such a solid SAT score could possibly make a thread this ignorant, and frankly, just stupid.</p>
<p>This thread doesn’t even make any sense. Guessing penalty impedes the high scorers? The whole point of being a high scorer is that you’re sure that your answer is correct so you don’t have to guess.</p>
<p>Talking about getting rid of the guessing penalty if you can reduce your choices down to 2 choices is just unrealistic and overly idealistic. Sure, it would make (some) sense, but in essence, the “guessing penalty” is just fine how it is.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t advocate eliminating the guessing penalty, but I would change the way the quarter-point penalties are rounded. I don’t have a problem with losing .25 points for an incorrect answer, but I do have a problem with a -2 immediately becoming a -4 when you miss one more question. Take this month’s CR curve as an example: missing one took no points off your score, missing two took ten points off your score, and getting three wrong took fifty points off your score. There’s something wrong with that picture.</p>
<p>Obviously, it’d be difficult (i.e. impossible) to work out a system where scores still came out in multiples of ten if every quarter-point were factored in. But I think there’s something unfair going on when the difference between 2 wrong and 3 wrong is so great. Perhaps CB could come up with a system where half-points were factored in so that scores didn’t have to be rounded so much.</p>