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shristi20
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Verbal score optimization 23 Aug 2019, 05:02
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is it better to leave last 5 questions in verbal or guess + mark them? would my score be higher if those questions were wrong as compared to leaving them unattempted?
any idea about how penalty works?
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MartyTargetTestPrep
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Verbal score optimization 23 Aug 2019, 05:21
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Hi.

You are better off guessing and answering the last five than just skipping them.

Unlike some other tests, the GMAT considers a question left unanswered worse than an incorrectly answered question. Also, in guessing, you may answer some correctly.
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Verbal score optimization 23 Aug 2019, 05:28
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shristi20
is it better to leave last 5 questions in verbal or guess + mark them? would my score be higher if those questions were wrong as compared to leaving them unattempted?
any idea about how penalty works?
Leaving the questions un-attempted involves a much higher penalty than you would have received if you'd answer then wrong.
You might want to refer to this for a better understanding https://gmatclub.com/forum/new-format-g ... 69682.html
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Verbal score optimization 23 Aug 2019, 08:29
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shristi20
is it better to leave last 5 questions in verbal or guess + mark them? would my score be higher if those questions were wrong as compared to leaving them unattempted?
any idea about how penalty works?

Definitely, guessing them! There is 1 in 5 chance you may get it right... suppose you still get every single one of them wrong - even then, this is better than leaving it unattended.

Analogy - you have 5 footballs
1.) you need to goal with a blindfold - is there a chance (doesn't matter how tiny) of you scoring? Absolutely yes!
2.) you don't shoot any of those 5 balls - is there a chance (doesn't matter how tiny) of you scoring? Absolutely NO!

There you have it :)
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Verbal score optimization 27 Aug 2019, 12:38
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shristi20
is it better to leave last 5 questions in verbal or guess + mark them? would my score be higher if those questions were wrong as compared to leaving them unattempted?
any idea about how penalty works?

This short article was published by the GMAC and is based on research into actual test-taker data.

https://www.mba.com/articles-and-announ ... d-guessing

What they say is, if you have five or fewer questions left in Verbal, statistically, it doesn't make much of a difference whether you guess on them or leave them unanswered. More than about five, you should guess. And personally, I'd lean towards guessing, but I'm an optimist - there's always a chance I might get multiple right answers, maybe by quickly skimming the answer choices to eliminate ones that look unlikely to be right.

Note that this isn't the case in Quant: on Quant, you should always guess instead of leaving questions blank.
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