A Simple Guide To Guessing In A Test

When you’re taking the test, you may find yourself stuck on a question. Some of the answer choices seem better than others, but you don’t see the one answer choice that is obviously correct. What do you do?
The scenario described above is very common, yet most test takers have not effectively prepared for it. Developing and practicing a plan for guessing may be one of the single most effective uses of your time as you get ready for the exam.

In developing your plan for guessing, there are three questions to address:
- When should you start the guessing process?
- How should you narrow down the choices?
- Which answer should you choose?

When to Start the Guessing Process
Unless your plan for guessing is to select D every time (which, despite its merits, is not what we recommend), you need to leave yourself enough time to apply your answer elimination strategies. Since you have a limited amount of time for each question, that means that if you’re going to give yourself the best shot at guessing correctly, you have to decide quickly whether or not you will guess.
Of course, the best-case scenario is that you don’t have to guess at all, so first, see if you can answer the question based on your knowledge of the subject and basic reasoning skills. Focus on the key words in the question and try to jog your memory of related topics. Give yourself a chance to bring the knowledge to mind, but once you realize that you don’t have (or you can’t access) the knowledge you need to answer the question, it’s time to start the guessing process.
It’s almost always better to start the guessing process too early than too late. It only takes a few seconds to remember something and answer the question from knowledge. Carefully eliminating wrong answer choices takes longer. Plus, going through the process of eliminating answer choices can actually help jog your memory.

Start the guessing process as soon as you decide that you can’t answer the question based on your knowledge.

How to Narrow Down Your Choices
Your chances of guessing an answer correctly depend on how many options you are choosing from. 

How many choices you have  - How likely you are to guess correctly 
5  - 20%
4 - 25% 
3  - 33%
2 - 50% 
1  - 100%

You can see from this chart just how valuable it is to be able to eliminate incorrect answers and make an educated guess, but there are two things that many test takers do that cause them to miss out on the benefits of guessing:
- Accidentally eliminating the correct answer
- Selecting an answer based on an impression

To avoid accidentally eliminating the correct answer, take this $5 challenge. 
In this challenge, you only eliminate an answer choice from contention if you are willing to bet $5 on it being wrong. Why $5? Five dollars is a small but not insignificant amount of money. It’s an amount you could afford to lose but wouldn’t want to throw away. And while losing $5 once might not hurt too much, doing it twenty times will set you back $100.

In the same way, each small decision you make—eliminating a choice here, guessing on a question there—won’t by itself impact your score very much, but when you put them all together, they can make a big difference. By holding each answer choice elimination decision to a higher standard, you can reduce the risk of accidentally eliminating the correct answer.

The $5 challenge can also be applied in a positive sense: If you are willing to bet $5 that an answer choice is correct, go ahead and mark it as correct.
Only eliminate an answer choice if you are willing to bet $5 that it is wrong.

Which Answer to Choose
You’re taking the test. You’ve run into a hard question and decided you’ll have to guess. You’ve eliminated all the answer choices you’re willing to bet $5 on. Now you have to pick an answer. Why do we even need to talk about this? Why can’t you just pick whichever one you feel like when the time comes?
The answer to these questions is that if you don’t come into the test with a plan, you’ll rely on your impression to select an answer choice, and if you do that, you risk falling into a trap. The test writers know that everyone who takes their test will be guessing on some of the questions, so they intentionally write wrong answer choices to seem plausible. You still have to pick an answer though, and if the wrong answer choices are designed to look right, how can you ever be sure that you’re not falling for their trap? The best solution we’ve found to this dilemma is to take the decision out of your hands entirely. Here is the process we recommend:
Once you’ve eliminated any choices that you are confident (willing to bet $5) are wrong, select the first remaining choice as your answer.
Whether you choose to select the first remaining choice, the second, or the last, the important thing is that you use some preselected standard. Using this approach guarantees that you will not be enticed into selecting an answer choice that looks right, because you are not basing your decision on how the answer choices look.
This is not meant to make you question your knowledge. Instead, it is to help you recognize the difference between your knowledge and your impressions. There’s a huge difference between thinking an answer is right because of what you know, and thinking an answer is right because it looks or sounds like it should be right.

To ensure that your answer selection is appropriately random, make a predetermined selection from among all answer choices you have not eliminated.