Terri of Prepped and Polished talks about when to guess and when to skip on challenging SSAT test questions.
Guessing Vs. Skipping on the SSAT Upper and Middle Level Tests
Well, right off the bat, let me show you how the scoring works. Skipping a question gains you zero points, an incorrect answer you’re penalized a quarter point, while a correct answer you get one point.
Now, you might be lucky guessing, you might be a good guesser, but statistically random guessing will not boost your score. Here’s a scenario that might show you what I mean. Say you make four random guesses, and they’re all incorrect. That would be minus one because each incorrect answer is minus a quarter point.
And then let’s say you got an answer correct, you would get plus one point. And your gain would be zero, it would be flat. So what does boost your score? And that, as I said, is the power of elimination. Guessing aggressively using a variety of strategies to eliminate incorrect answers, strategies that you’ve learned through tutoring or studying. And that boosts your chances of plus one for each correct answer.
Here’s a little more data just to show you what I mean. There’s five answer choices. If you eliminate 2, your odds go up 33.3% that you will pick the correct answer. Additionally, if you can eliminate three choices, your odds will go up 50%, that’s pretty good.
Skipping is only for the hardest of questions when you absolutely can’t eliminate any answer choices. Now, the questions go from easy to hard except for reading. So, you know, on the verbal reasoning and quantitative sections, you might feel like skipping at the end of those sections they’ll be the harder questions but, you know, still try to use your power of elimination.
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