Should you guess on the SAT II U.S. History? We’ll begin to answer this question by posing a question of our own:
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt is holding five cards, numbered 1–5. Without telling you, he has selected one of the numbers as the “correct” card. If you pick a single card, what is the probability that you will choose the “correct” card? |
The answer, of course, is 1 in 5. But the answer is only important if you recognize that this question precisely describes the situation you’re in when you blindly guess on any SAT II U.S. History question—you have a 1 in 5 chance of getting the question right. If you were to blindly guess on ten questions in a row, you would (according to probability) get two questions right and eight questions wrong.
- 2 right answers gets you 2 raw points
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8 wrong answers gets you
1/4 points = –2 raw points
Those ten answers, therefore, net you a total of zero points. ETS designed the scoring system in such a way that random guessing is pointless. They want to ensure you have to think.
Educated Guessing
Suppose you’re faced with this question:
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You probably don’t know in what year George Washington was born (and you won’t need to know such a minor fact for the SAT II test). But you do know that Washington was not born in 1977. Once you’ve eliminated “1977” as a possible answer, you have four remaining choices. Is it worth it to guess? Yes. Probability states that if you are guessing between four choices you will get one question right for every three you get wrong. For that one correct answer you’ll get 1 point, and for the three incorrect answers you’ll lose a total of 3/ 4 of a point.
The math indicates that if you can eliminate one answer, the odds of guessing are in your favor: you become more likely to gain points than to lose points.
The rule for guessing on the SAT II U.S. History, therefore, is simple: if you can eliminate even one answer choice on a question, you should definitely guess.
If You’re Stumped
If you cannot eliminate even one answer choice and find yourself staring at a certain question with mounting panic, throw a circle around that nasty question and move on. Return to it later if you have time. Remember, answering a hard question correctly doesn’t earn you any more points than answering an easy question correctly. You want to be sure to hit every question you can answer instead of running out of time by fixating on the really tough questions. While taking five minutes to solve a particularly difficult question might strike you as a moral victory when you’re taking the test, you possibly could have used that same time to answer six other questions that would have vastly increased your score. Instead of getting bogged down on individual questions, you will do better if you learn to skip and leave for later the very difficult questions that either you can’t answer or that will take an extremely long time to figure out.