Skipping or Guessing

Question

Hello! I have my exam coming up soon. I was working on some test taking strategies about guessing or skipping. It is to decide whether to guess the remaining questions or skip the most end ones and keep on doing the ones in hand. for eg. suppose I am on verbal section and I have five or fewer question left with a minute or two (yes this sound very horrifying). So how should I go about it? Should I just start guessing each answer blindly so that I don't leave any question unanswered or should I just solve the question in hand and Continue , leaving 2-3 questions unanswered. Which is the optimal strategy? 
Also, is there a difference between quant and verbal regarding this strategy?  AndrewN   IanStewart   GMATNinja   DmitryFarber

AndrewN · Answer

Hello,  pk6969 . If you are working on a so-called  optimal  strategy, then you need to answer as many questions as possible. Not finishing a section with even three questions unanswered at the end can put a dent in an otherwise fine score. Of course, missing three questions back to back at the end can also hurt your score, but at least there is the potential to have answered correctly in any one of those three. If I were looking at a Verbal section, perhaps a Reading Comprehension passage, with a minute to go, I would probably scan the answer choices for common traps—e.g., overreaching language ( must not ,  the best )—then take a shot on one and move on. With Quant, I might rely less on the language, but more on the answer choices (for PS questions) or logic alone if I had not left myself enough time to work a problem. Bottom line: Finish the section.

Of course, this is not to say that you should rush through the second half of the section just to finish—accuracy along the way is quite important—but if your back is against the wall in a worst-case scenario at the end of the section, I say guess.

Good luck with your exam. Relax as much as you can.

- Andrew

GmatKnightTutor · Answer

"It is to decide whether to guess the remaining questions or skip the most end ones and keep on doing the ones in hand."

Probably a good idea to not skip/guess on consecutive questions.

ReedArnoldMPREP · Answer

You should try to not leave any question blank.

And you should plan on not being in a situation where you have 5 questions left and 1 minute.

Have a timing strategy that keeps you basically on pace. If you have to guess on one or two at the very end? Not ideal, but you don't want to have to rush guess five. It's just too many (though...again, better than leaving blank).

Whenever I find myself with more questions than time (e.g. 2 minutes for two questions), I usually dedicate full time to one of the questions and guess quickly on the other. I find that 100% on 50% of the questions is better than 50% on 100% of the questions, in such a case. You have a better chance of getting one of the questions right with full investment on one. Half investment just doesn't quite cut it.

IanStewart · Answer

This is actually a bit of a complicated topic - the optimal strategy depends on a lot of things, including your ability level, and the number of questions you expect you'll need to guess quickly at just to finish on time. In general, the higher your level, the more important it is to finish the section, even if that means guessing randomly to do so. For a below-average test taker, though, it's actually worse to guess randomly at the end than to leave unfinished questions 'blank' most of the time. Assuming you're Q40+ and V30+, you should finish each section no matter how you need to do it. Leaving guesses to the end of the section isn't all that bad, but it's much better (this is easy to do in Quant, hard to do in Verbal) to guess quickly, if you know you will absolutely need to guess, at very hard-looking questions in the middle of the test, rather than guess at the end. Guesses at very hard questions aren't going to hurt you much at all, but guesses at the end can hurt if an easier question happens to show up and you don't have time to answer it properly.

I agree with Reed's comment above about rushing. WIth two minutes left, and two questions to go, it's much better to invest almost the full two minutes in one question, and guess almost randomly at the other, than it is to rush both. Most people spending one minute per question don't do much better than they would guessing randomly anyway. So if you have two minutes to go, and two questions left, or four minutes to go and four questions left, glance at the question in front of you, and quickly decide "I can probably do this" or "I'm not sure I can do this". If you think you can solve, invest the time and guess later, and if you're not sure, guess now and invest your time in the next question, or the one after that. But in Quant in particular, ideally you make any guesses you know you need to make at hard questions in the middle of the test, rather than at the end.

And don't worry about guessing at consecutive questions - if you get two hard questions in a row, and need to guess at both of them, that won't hurt you any more than guessing at two hard questions that are spaced out in the test. The fact that the questions are consecutive is irrelevant. It's question difficulty that matters.

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

You ask a very good question. I agree with some of the points already mentioned. So, in the scenario where you have 4 questions left, and only two minutes, spend about a minute 30 seconds on one of the questions and then guess on the remaining 3 so that you get the answers in before your test ends.

However, I think the other point here is that you want to get to a place where you do not have to guess on 4 to 5 questions at the end of the quant or verbal section, so if you need any further advice regarding timing, feel free to reach out.

Good luck with your GMAT!

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