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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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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?
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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?
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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?
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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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