{"id":9624,"date":"2012-06-01T11:09:50","date_gmt":"2012-06-01T15:09:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/?p=9624"},"modified":"2012-06-01T11:09:50","modified_gmt":"2012-06-01T15:09:50","slug":"should-you-guess-on-the-sat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/?p=9624","title":{"rendered":"Should you guess on the SAT?"},"content":{"rendered":"

What you don’t know can help you, if you play the percentages<\/span><\/em><\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

By Bradley Everett<\/strong>, Special to UnionvilleTimes.com<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>If you search for \u201cShould I Guess on the SAT\u201d on Google, you will get about 196 Million results (and a lot of different answers). \u00a0So we\u2019ll take a stab at giving you an answer with the 196 Million and first.<\/p>\n

You get one full point for each correct answer and lose 1\/4 of a point for each incorrect answer. \u00a0However, you neither gain nor lose anything with an answer left blank. \u00a0With that in mind, it would take 4 wrong answers to offset one correct answer. \u00a0Let’s look at it on a probability basis.<\/p>\n

Each multiple choice question gives you 5 choices. \u00a0Let’s say there are 30 questions throughout the test that you aren’t sure of. \u00a0However, you may know enough about a question to eliminate some answers as not being the correct answer (for example, you don’t know if the answer is ‘canal,’ ‘thoroughfare’, or \u201cstreet,\u201d but you know it’s not ‘digital.’ \u00a0You could cross out ‘digital’ and guess out of the remaining 4 choices. \u00a0Let’s see how your score would change based on how many “wrong” answers you are able to eliminate.<\/p>\n

No Idea At All<\/strong>. \u00a0Let’s say you are completely clueless, and can not eliminate any answers. \u00a0Guessing randomly out of 5 questions, you can expect to get approximately 6 correct and 24 wrong. \u00a0You would get 6 points for the right answers and lose 6 points (24 x .25) for the incorrect answers. \u00a0The net raw score from guess is 0. \u00a0So, as you can see, guessing with no eliminated answers will likely not help (or hurt) very much. \u00a0It may just be a waste of time.<\/p>\n

Eliminate One Choice<\/strong>. \u00a0If you can eliminate JUST one choice, the odds begin to swing in your favor. \u00a0If you can eliminate an answer, you are really guessing out of 4 choices, so you can expect to get approximately 7.5 questions right and 22.5 questions wrong. \u00a0This translates into a raw score of 1.875. \u00a0Scores aren’t calculated this way (with decimals), but we want to provide an average of how your score can improve.<\/p>\n

Eliminate Two Choices: <\/strong>\u00a0By eliminating two choices, you can guess out of three, rather than 5, answer choices. \u00a0Over 30 questions, you can expect to get around 10 of them right, and 20 of them wrong. \u00a0This translates to a raw score of 5.<\/p>\n

Eliminate Three Answer Choices:<\/strong> \u00a0If you can get rid of 3 answer choices and just guess out of 2 choices, you are in really good shape. \u00a0You can expect around 15 correct answers out of 30 and 15 incorrect. \u00a0This equates to a raw score of 11.25.<\/p>\n

As you can see, with each answer choice you are able to eliminate, you greatly improve your chance of increasing your raw score over the course of the test. \u00a0As a rule of thumb, if you can eliminate one<\/em> answer choice, GUESS! \u00a0<\/strong>Remember, eliminate answers very discerningly! \u00a0If you eliminate the Correct answer, you’ve already guaranteed you will not get that question right.<\/p>\n

Grid-In Questions<\/strong><\/p>\n

For grid-in questions (on the math section), ignore everything I just said. \u00a0No points are taken off for wrong answers, so guess on all of them!<\/p>\n

Bradley Everett founded Unionville-based The Thinking Cap<\/a> in 2007 to help local students achieve their academic goals. He received a degree in Applied Mathematics from The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.\u00a0\u00a0He has spent the majority of his career in the investment industry, beginning on the advisory and retail side before turning to analyst and research roles.\u00a0\u00a0He has completed all three testing levels of the Chartered Financial Analyst program.\u00a0\u00a0His unique background has helped to provide equally unique methods to help students in all levels of mathematics.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What you don’t know can help you, if you play the percentages By Bradley Everett, Special to UnionvilleTimes.com If you search for \u201cShould I Guess on the SAT\u201d on Google, you will get about 196 Million results (and a lot of different answers). \u00a0So we\u2019ll take a stab at giving you an answer with the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":9626,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,7],"tags":[1027,1096,838,43,1404],"class_list":["post-9624","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community","category-featured","tag-education","tag-sat","tag-sat-prep","tag-schools-2","tag-testing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9624","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9624"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9624\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/9626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9624"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9624"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.unionvilletimes.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9624"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}