If you’re a Junior in high school—or even a Sophomore or Senior!—and are preparing for an upcoming Digital SAT or Enhanced ACT, you may have some fundamental questions about the format of the tests, and the best strategies for moving through them. In fact, one of the most common opening questions I hear from students who’ve just walked through the (real or virtual) door to a one-on-one test prep session with me is:
should I Guess on the SAT / ACT?
After all, many students run short on time on some sections of the test. And even if you’re a speed demon when it comes to moving through the test, you might still encounter questions don’t know how to answer.
So that’s where this post comes in. I’m going to answer many of your most pressing FAQs about guessing on the ACT and SAT…as well as let you in on the types of questions you’re better off guessing on…and HOW to do so.
So let’s get to it!
ARTICLE CONTENTS
1. Video version of this article
2. Will I Lose Points for Guessing Wrong on the ACT and Digital SAT?
3. Should I Guess on the ACT and Digital SAT?
B. When You Have No Time (or No Clue)
C. Student-Produced Responses (SAT Math)
D. The Best ACT Reading Guessing Method
E. The Best ACT Experimental Passages Guessing Method
5. Conclusion
Watch this article as a video:
Does the SAT or ACT have a guessing penalty?
No! If you get a question incorrect on either the ACT or the SAT, you will NOT be penalized. Granted, you also won’t get that question RIGHT…which means your score will not be as high as it would have been had you gotten it correct. But you won’t have any points knocked off for being wrong.
If you’re a parent reading this, and you took the SAT back in your day (or you have an older son or daughter who took the test in 2015 or earlier), this might be news to you.
After all, students who took the test prior to January 2016, DID have their raw score docked a quarter of a point for each wrong answer they bubbled in. Thus, every time you weren’t 100% certain of an answer, you had to make this really tough decision: do I make an educated guess to try to win another point, knowing that I might be wrong and risk not only NOT getting the point BUT ALSO being deducted 0.25 of a raw score point? Or do I simply not risk anything, NOT get deducted any points, but leave potential points on the table? Guessing was a real nail-biter for most of my pre-2016 students, to say the least!
However, now, that conundrum is a thing of the past! You will NOT be penalized for a wrong answer on either the current SAT or the current ACT.
Which brings me to our next question…
Is it helpful to guess on the ACT and Digital SAT?
Yes, it’s helpful. In fact, you are walking away from potential points if you leave a question blank, my friend.
That said, there are different strategies for doing so. The strategy you should pursue depends on WHY you need to guess in the first place. Thus, you need to give yourself a bit of time while you’re taking the test to understand which situation you’re in and act accordingly.
#1: How to Do Educated Guessing on Standardized Tests
Let’s say you’re working your way through a section of the ACT or a module of the Digital SAT, and you stumble across a question that you theoretically could answer. However, maybe you’re drawing a temporary blank about proper comma usage in the ACT English or SAT Reading + Writing section. Or perhaps you work through a fractions problem on the Math section and none of the answer choices match what you just calculated.
In any of these cases, you’re going to do what I call “Educated Guessing”—which is to eliminate the answer choices that you KNOW are wrong, and just pick whichever answer choice seems “best” out of the ones that are left over.
Note that in the ACT Reading Section and Digital SAT’s Reading + Writing module, the directions even TELL you to pick the answer that is “best”—not “right.” So if the answer you’re thinking of in your head doesn’t 100% match the possible answers provided, this is how you’ll move forward: eliminate answer choices that have something definitely WRONG about them, and pick the lesser evil out of what’s left.
#2: How to guess when you have no clue (or no time)
What if you simply don’t have time to properly read or think about the answer to a question? Or worse, you look at it and draw a total blank as to how to go about answering it?
If you can’t eliminate any answer choice or don’t have time to even try the question, my biggest piece of advice to you is to BE CONSISTENT in your guessing. In other words, pick your “answer choice of the day”—and stick with it.
On the Digital SAT
On the Digital SAT, your multiple-choice options are A, B, C, and D. So if you have four questions at the end of a module that you don’t have time to do, bubble in the SAME answer choice for all of them: B, B, B, B, or D, D, D, D, etc.
On the new ACT
And what about the Enhanced ACT (the version of the ACT that students have been taking since 2025)?
Like the SAT, the ACT offers four answer choices for every single question. However, unlike the SAT, these answer choices will alternate from question to question, between A/B/C/D and F/G/H/J.
So you’re going to follow the same strategy I outlined for the SAT: just pick one answer choice of the day and apply it to each question where you’re forced to use no-clue/no-time guessing.
But because you’ve got two sets of letter options—A/B/C/D and F/G/H/J—you’re going to basically pick a column/answer position and stick with it every time you have to do no-clue guessing. So maybe you’ll choose the first column in the letter choices, which would correspond to both A and F, and choose ONLY those letters when you have to guess. Or maybe you’ll be consistently loyal to the pair of second options (B and G). Etc., etc.
(Note that while the Math section USED to have five answer choices per question, that is no longer the case!)
#3: Random guessing on student-produced responses on the SAT
If you are a Digital SAT person, you will know that Math on the test is composed of two different modules.
Each of those modules has 22 questions, giving the test a total of 44 Math questions. However, a fourth of those questions—11 out of the 44—do not offer you multiple-choice answers. Instead, the test gives you a blank, and you type in (“self-produce”) your answer. (These used to be called "grid-ins," but now that the test is digital, they’re known as “student-produced responses” or "self-produced responses.")
Keep in mind that each of those five character spaces you’re given can contain actual digits, a fraction line and/or a decimal point. If the number is negative, you can then use a sixth character space for the negative sign.
Think about that for a second. There are at least 100,000 different possible combinations of those integers/lines/decimal points…and those are just the POSITIVE numbers! Add a negative sign, now you’ve got over 200,000 different combos you could type in.
What’re the odds of getting that right if you were truly, randomly guessing?
Right. Super low. WAY lower than your 25% odds of correctly guessing a multiple-choice with only four options—an A, B, C, or D.
1. Try to avoid guessing on THIS type of question!
So the first thing to say about the guessing strategy for the student-produced math questions is this: if you can avoid it, don’t put yourself in a position where you have to guess on this type of question.
On the old, paper-and-pencil SAT, we knew ahead of time where “grid-in” questions would be grouped in the sequence of the test. However, on the new, Digital SAT, there’s no predicting which 11 questions are going to be self-produced. They are instead interspersed randomly throughout your modules.
So if you know you’re the type of student who tends to run out of time on those last few math questions, then about halfway through your module, you're going to do a quick scan and hunt for self-produced questions in the remaining Qs. If you find one (or more), you're going to skip ahead to them and actually solve them.
THEN, once you’ve solved them (if you know how), you’re going to return to where you were in the module and answer the remaining (now all multiple-choice) questions from there.
This way, if you run out of time, you run out of time on a multiple-choice question…which means you can simply pick your letter of the day and accept your decent (25%) chances of getting it right.
B) If you DO have to Guess on a self-produced question, guess a single digit from 0 to 9.
If you DO still have to guess on an SAT Student-Produced Math question—either because you just have no clue how to solve it, or you ended up running out of time anyways—try guessing a single digit from zero to nine.
Though the odds of guessing right on this type of question are still against you (unless it’s an “educated guess”), I’ve noticed that integers from zero through nine tend to be answers to a handful of questions on each test. So type in “2” or “7” or whatever single-digit number you’re feeling, and your chances of getting it right increase slightly!
#4: ACT Reading: Guessing Method
If you’re not a Digital SAT person, but an ACT one, you may have noticed that you need to move especially quickly through the test’s Reading section.
In fact, most students I know find the timing to be a challenge in this section. Even after I write up a personalized ACT Reading strategy for them, they might still be down to mere seconds as they bubble in their last answer…or might have to guess on a question or two because time ran out.
If this is YOU—i.e. you’ve figured out that the ACT is the test that best shows off your talents overall, but you’re always rushing through the Reading section and often have to guess on a handful of final questions—I have a strategy that will maximize the number of questions you can both reach and answer correctly.
The Enhanced ACT (the only type of ACT in town since 2025) asks you to read 4 passages and answer 9 questions about each…in 40 minutes total.
That means you have 10 minutes to answer 9 questions about each of your passages.
This is actually a less breakneck pace than the old ACT used to require, believe it or not! Nonetheless, a lot of students still feel rushed in this section on the current version of the test.
So your strategy in both cases is going to be simple:
don’t answer the “EXCEPT” Questions…instead, guess your “letter of the day” and move on!
What is an “EXCEPT” Question,” you ask? It’s a question for which THREE correct answers are provided…but YOU’VE been tasked with locating the one incorrect answer choice. For example, “All of the following office supplies can be found in Sarah’s desk drawer EXCEPT:” is what I refer to as an “EXCEPT” Question.
These questions are a drag because you have to do THREE TIMES THE WORK as you do in any other ACT Reading question type!
In our example, I’d have to go over the passage with a fine-toothed comb to locate THREE different tools in Sarah’s desk drawer—say, pens, erasers, and a stapler—so that I can then identify the correct answer—i.e., the answer choice with the one type of office supply I didn’t find in the passage (say, white-out!).
So, because “EXCEPT” questions are worth the same number of points as any other Q—but take three times the work to answer correctly—I say skip them if you’re consistently running short on time! Or rather, skip doing the WORK of them but bubble in your “answer of the day” so that you still have a shot at getting it right!
#5: Some ACT passages don't count. How should this affect your guessing method?
Every Enhanced ACT contains certain questions that are experimental—meaning that they do not affect your score at all, regardless of how well or how badly you do on them. (If you’re curious to know more, I explain experimental Qs in more depth in this blog post and this video!)
Here’s how you can take advantage of that fact when it comes to guessing.
If you are running out of time and have to resort to no-clue guessing—i.e. guessing quite randomly, without systematically eliminating answer choices, simply because you’re short on time—you want to do that guessing on experimental passages rather than REAL passages that count towards your score. It’s more advantageous to save your effort and time for passages that can afford you actual points!
With me so far?
So here’s the breakdown of which ACT passages are likely to be experimental:
ENGLISH contains a 10-question passage that is experimental. Thus, DON'T GUESS on the 5-question passages because you know those are not experimental.
MATH - 4 random questions will be experimental. We have no way of knowing which, so just apply the standardized “Educated” or “No-Clue” guessing strategies above.
READING - one entire passage is experimental, though we can’t know which. So make sure you spend some time actually working on ALL passages, even if that means you have to guess on a question or two for some or all passages to spread your time evenly among the passages.
SCIENCE - a 6-question passage is experimental...and it's almost always an "Experiments" passage. So DON'T GUESS on the Charts and Graphs passages or on the Fighting Scientist passage because those are NOT experimental.
Conclusion
You may have realized, in reading this post, that there’s a LOT more to guessing on the Digital SAT and ACT than you previously thought! There’s strategy involved—both in HOW you guess as well as WHEN you guess and on WHAT TYPE of questions you even guess ON.
The good news is that once you understand little strategies like these, your confidence will begin to build…and you’ll start to consistently score higher and higher on the Digital SAT and ACT.
And if you like learning pro tips and strategies like these, do you know how to gain insider access to a whole lot MORE of them? By working with me to drastically raise your Digital SAT and ACT test scores, of course! I’ve been helping students all over the world do just that for over fifteen years, and I still have a few spots left for private tutoring students. (You can contact me here!)
