Know How to Guess
ETS doesn’t take off 1 /4 of a point for each wrong answer in order to punish you for guessing. They do it so as not to reward you for blind guessing. Suppose, without even glancing at any of the questions, you just randomly entered responses in the first 20 spaces on your answer sheet. Because there’s a one-in-five chance of guessing correctly on any given question, odds are you would guess right for 4 questions and wrong for 16 questions. Your raw score for those 20 questions would then be:
Because of the 1/4 point penalty for wrong answers, you would be no better off and no worse off than if you’d left those twenty spaces blank.
Now suppose in each of the first 20 questions you are able to eliminate just 1 possible answer choice so that you guess with a 1/4 chance of being right. Odds are, you’d get 5 questions right and 15 questions wrong, giving you a raw score of:
All of a sudden, you’re more than a point up. It’s not much, but every little bit helps.
The lesson to be learned here is that blind guessing doesn’t help, but educated guessing does. If you can eliminate even one of the five possible answer choices, you must guess. We’ll discuss how to eliminate answer choices on certain special kinds of questions later in this chapter.