Educated guess vs random guess

Hi nphsingh,

There are some interesting aspects to the scoring algorithm for the Official GMAT that are worth knowing. Unfortunately, there is NO partial credit - you either select the one correct answer or you select one of the four incorrect answers. Each of the 4 wrong answers is treated the same (as far as the algorithm is concerned).

There are some other aspects of the program that you should know though:

1) If you leave any questions unanswered, then those questions are marked as 'incorrect' AND then are penalized. Thus, it's better to guess on those last couple of questions than to run out of time and not answer them.

2) There are experimental questions in both the Quant and Verbal section that do NOT count, so you shouldn't get too 'invested' or too 'emotional' on any one question (since it might not even count). Unfortunately, you won't know which ones those are.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Thank you all for your replies.

Hi nphsingh,

This topic is very subjective. The guess which may be an intelligent guess for you might not be the same for some other. In GMAT exam you get marks only for the correct answers.

www.manyagroup.com

Agreed - it is subjective because it's impossible to know if you have correctly eliminated three wrong answer choices and the test doesn't know which choices you have eliminated.

However, this is a very important point for test takers because many people don't work hard enough at eliminating incorrect answer choices along their way. They get late in the clock searching for the correct answer, start to panic when they see they are late and take a random guess. People need to have an explicit strategy around switching to "educated guess mode" at some point in every problem they can't figure out. Even eliminating a single incorrect answer increasing the chances of getting the problem correct. Those increased chances will add up to a higher score over the course of the exam...

KW

Hello nphsingh,

The GMAT doesn't give partial credit or credit that is different based on whether the answer is an educated or blind guess. Your answer is just right or wrong. I find that blind guesses are almost never right. But educated guesses will be a valuable friend. Here's are some tips on educated guessing: https://gmat.economist.com/blog/test-ta ... g-and-gmat.
https://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/20 ... ed-guesses
Use process of elimination first to narrow your answer choices down to 2 choices if you can, and then guess.

I hope that helps!