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Timing and Random Guessing

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Timing and Random Guessing

by rwbyrnes » Sun Jul 12, 2009 4:31 pm
I've been working on MGMAT self study for the past 2 months and they preach strategic guessing but in the case that you are running out of time towards the end that you should guess randomly to make sure that you have answered as many questions as possible. I noticed in my practice tests that when I randomly guess (i.e. literally not even reading the question), I am getting most of the questions wrong. In fact, the best score I received so far in a practice CAT has been luck because I guessed correctly on a few of the last questions.

What is the general strategy here for timing? Will I get a better score if don't do this? Should I leave the last 5-6 questions unanswered?

Any input would be helpful. Thanks.

RB
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by VP_Jim » Sun Jul 12, 2009 6:04 pm
Well, if you randomly guess, you SHOULD be getting most questions wrong! You should only expect to guess the right answer about 20% of the time - i.e., one out of five times since there are five answer choices.

As for a timing strategy, never, never, ever leave questions blank. You have a 0% chance of getting a blank question right, as opposed to 20% for a random guess. Also, long strings of wrong answers hurt your score more than do the same number of wrong answers sprinkled throughout your test. So, your guessing strategy should be to pick and choose which problems you want to guess on - wait for a particularly hard problem (one that you'd likely get wrong, anyway), guess on it, and move on. That way, you don't have long strings of wrong answers and you're proactively choosing which problems to guess on rather than simply guessing on the last few - some of which you may have gotten right had you saved some time.

Hope this helps!
Jim S. | GMAT Instructor | Veritas Prep
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