If you’re a rising Junior in high school—or even a Sophomore or Senior!—and you’re in the throes of prepping for an upcoming SAT or ACT, you may be struggling to understand the overall format and strategies of these tests in the first place. In fact, one of the first questions I most frequently hear from students new to my expert test prep tutoring business is:
Can I Guess on the ACT and SAT?
After all, it’s not uncommon for a student not to have the TIME to get to some of the questions on test day. And even if you’re a quick test-taker, there might simply be questions you don’t know how to answer!
So that’s where this article comes in: I’m going to answer many of your most burning 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 it.
So let’s get to it!
Will I be penalized for guessing incorrectly on the SAT and ACT?
No! If you get a question incorrect on either the ACT or the SAT, you will NOT be penalized. Granted, you 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 get docked any points for being wrong.
If you’re a parent reading this, and either YOU took the SAT or you have an older son or daughter who took it in 2015 or prior, this might be news to you. After all, prior to the January 2016 rollout of the current version of the SAT, your raw score WAS deducted a quarter of a point for each wrong answer you gave. Thus, every time you weren’t 100% certain of an answer, you had to make this grueling 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 docked 0.25 of a raw score point? Or do I simply not risk anything, NOT get deducted any points, but risk that I might have actually known the answer and didn’t get it? It was a torturous conundrum 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 SAT or ACT.
Which brings me to our next question…
Should I Guess Answers on the ACT and SAT?
YES! In fact, you are leaving points on the table if you leave a question blank (or “omit” it).
That said, depending on WHY you are going to guess, there are different strategies for doing so. Thus, you need to have a little self-awareness while you’re taking the test to understand which situation you’re in and act accordingly.
Guessing Strategy #1: Educated Guessing
Let’s say you’re working your way through a section of the SAT or ACT, and you stumble across a question that you theoretically could answer. However, maybe you’re having a temporary brain fart about how to use a semi-colon in the ACT English or SAT Writing section. Or perhaps you work through a ratio question 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 and SAT Reading sections, 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.
Guessing Strategy #2: “No Time” or “No Clue” Guessing
What if you simply don’t have time to get to a question and even try it out? Or worse, you look at it and feel like you’re reading Greek (and unlike me, you’re NOT Greek)?
If you can’t eliminate anything 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 SAT, your multiple-choice options are A, B, C, and D, so if you have four questions at the end of a section 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, or A, A, A, A, etc.
If you’re taking the ACT, however, remember that the answer choices alternate from A/B/C/D/E to F/G/H/J/K on the Math section and from A/B/C/D to F/G/H/J on the other (English, Reading and Science) sections, so just keep the column consistent! In this case, if you have four questions at the end of the section that you don’t have time to do, bubble in the SAME answer column for all of them: B, G, B, G, or D, J, D, J, or E, K, E, K, etc.
Guessing Strategy #3: How to Guess on SAT’s Grid-In Questions
If you’re taking the SAT, you know that the last five questions (#16-20) on the No-Calculator Math section and the last eight questions (#31-38) of the Calculator Math section are NOT multiple choice! They’re what we call “Grid-In” questions, meaning that you have to self-produce your answer. Your answers to these questions could be one to four digits long, and could include a decimal or a fraction line.
So, if you no longer have a one-in-four chance of getting it right by guessing—because you’re NOT merely picking among A, B, C or D—HOW do you try to guess on these?
I have two major tips for this that have helped all of MY private students immensely:
A) If you don’t have time for all of the questions on the SAT Math, don’t answer the Grid-In questions last!
Yes, I know they ARE the last questions in the section, but if I were running out of time, I’d rather have a 1/4 chance of getting a question right…than a <1/10,000 chance of getting it right. And there are more than 10,000 possible numbers you could self-produce for a Grid-In question!
SO, when I have students whose practice tests show that they probably won’t have time to complete the SAT Math, I give them instructions to rearrange the order in which they attack the questions! I’ll have them answer the first two-thirds to four-fifths of the multiple-choice questions, THEN skip to the Grid-Ins, and THEN return to those last few multiple-choice questions.
In concrete terms, that means that I might have them answer #1-12 of the No-Calculator Math multiple choice, THEN #16-20 (the Grid-Ins), and THEN try #13-15. For the Calculator Math section, I might nudge them to answer #1-25 of the multiple choice, then #31-38 (the Grid-Ins), and then #26-30 if there’s time.
And there’s a second reason this strategy works well: SAT multiple-choice questions tend to increase in difficulty from easy to hard…but the difficulty level RESTARTS at “easy” for the Grid-In questions! So, I’d rather my short-of-time students make sure they have every opportunity to answer the easier Grid-In questions that I know they could easily nab. If they do, in fact, run out of time for that section, they will likely only miss out on the “hard” multiple-choice questions—which they might not have known how to do, anyway, and thus have better odds of guessing on. So, it’s a win-win strategy.
B) If you DO have to Guess on a Grid-In question, guess a single digit from 0 to 9.
If you DO still have to guess on an SAT Grid-In Math question—either because you just have no clue or you ran out of time anyways—try guessing a single digit from zero to nine.
Though the odds of guessing on this type of question are 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 bubble in “2” or “7” or whatever single-digit number you’re feeling, and your odds of getting it right are slightly better!
Guessing Strategy #4: The Type of ACT Reading Question You Should Guess On (If You’re Short On Time)
(This also works for the SAT Reading, but since the time constraint is more generous on that test, you’re less likely to need to guess to complete the SAT Reading.)
If you’re an ACT test-taker, you may have noticed that you don’t exactly have all day to answer all the questions in the Reading section. In fact, if you’re a regular time test-taker, you only have 8:45 (8 minutes and 45 seconds) to not only READ an entire passage, but also accurately ANSWER its accompanying 10 questions!
Most students I know have trouble with this. Even after we create their personalized ACT Reading strategy together, they might still be down to mere seconds towards the end…or might have to guess on a question or two because time ran out.
If this is YOU—i.e. the ACT IS your test, but you’re always rushing through the Reading section and often have to guess on those last few pesky questions—I have a strategy that will maximize the number of questions you can get to.
It’s 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 finding the one incorrect answer choice. For example, “All of the following plants are located in Amelia’s favorite garden EXCEPT:” is what I refer to as an “EXCEPT” Question.
These questions are annoying because you have to do THREE TIMES THE WORK to get it right as compared to any other ACT Reading question! In our example, I’d have to scour the passage to actively locate THREE DIFFERENT PLANTS in Amelia’s garden—say, roses, daisies, and lilacs—to then be able to identify the correct answer—i.e., the answer choice with the one plant I didn’t locate in the passage (poor zinnias!).
Since “EXCEPT” Questions are worth the same amount of points as any other—but take three times the work to answer correctly—I say skip them if you’re consistently low on time! Or rather, skip doing the WORK of them but bubble in your “answer of the day” so that you have a shot at getting it right!
So, by now, you’ve probably realized that there’s a LOT more to guessing on the 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 beauty is that once you understand little strategies like these, your confidence will begin to climb…and you’ll start to consistently score higher and higher on the SAT and ACT!
And if you like learning pro tips and strategies like these, do you know how you can get access to a whole lot MORE of them? By working with me to drastically raise your SAT and ACT test scores, of course! I’ve been helping students all over the globe do just that for over a dozen years, and I still have a few spots left for private tutoring students. (Reach out here!)
