Which GMAT Problems Should I Guess On? – Part 1: How guessing affects your score
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On a traditional exam, everybody takes the same test, but gets a different number of questions correct. The GMAT is the opposite. Everyone takes a different test, but everyone misses about the same number of questions. For instance, if you take the Manhattan Prep free practice GMAT, you’re almost certain to get between 40% and 60% of the Quant questions right. But if you get 50% of the questions right on a very tough GMAT, you’ll get a much higher score than someone who gets 50% of the questions right on a very easy GMAT.
The GMAT gives you an ‘average’ test to begin with, then adjusts the difficulty of the test until you’re able to answer about half of the questions correctly. At the beginning of the GMAT, the questions might feel too hard or too easy. But that should only last a short while, since the test will quickly adapt to your level. Most of the GMAT will feel very difficult, but not totally impossible. That feeling tells you that the test is correctly estimating your abilities.
Your goal is to give the test an accurate idea of your abilities. But the test’s algorithm isn’t very smart. If you miss a problem, it has no idea whether you missed it because you didn’t know how to solve it, or because you made a careless mistake, or because you ran out of time and never got to see it at all. If you get a problem right, it doesn’t know whether you really understood it, or whether you took a wild guess. It assumes that every time you get a problem wrong, that problem was too hard for you.
If that assumption is incorrect, you won’t get the score you deserve.
If you miss a bunch of questions that you actually could have solved, the test doesn’t know that you really knew how to solve them! In fact, it assumes that you didn’t. So, you’ll get a score that’s lower than your real ability. But if you miss a bunch of questions that you didn’t know how to solve, your score will still be accurate. It’ll reflect your actual level of ability.
Sadly, you can’t trick the GMAT into thinking you’re better than you are. You can either get a score that reflects your abilities, or a score that’s too low. And the latter is surprisingly easy to do: just ask any engineer who’s been surprised by a low Quant score on their first attempt at the GMAT. A low score doesn’t mean that he or she actually isn’t good at math after all! It just means that the test underestimated the engineer’s abilities, because he or she hadn’t learned how to take it correctly yet.
When you have a lot of time until test day, you’re primarily focusing on strengthening your abilities. You’re actually getting better at logic, grammar, reading, and mathematics. But on test day, your abilities are what they are. There are many problems you’ll be able to solve, and many problems you won’t be able to solve.
If a problem is in the ‘could solve it’ bucket:
- Missing it can lower your score below your actual ability level, but
- You can avoid getting it wrong by working carefully.
These are the problems you actually have control over on test day. By working carefully, using the strategies you’ve learned, and double-checking your work, you can choose to get these problems right, and avoid dropping your score.
If a problem is in the ‘can’t solve it’ bucket:
- Missing it won’t lower your score below your actual ability level, and
- guessing gives you the best chance to avoid getting it wrong, anyways.
Your score isn’t going to be higher than your actual ability level, no matter what. And even if you miss every single question above your level, as long as you don’t miss any easy ones, your score will still reflect your actual abilities. The only way problems you can’t solve will affect your score is by causing you to run out of time at the end of the test — and that’s something you do have control over.
The most strategic way to take the GMAT is by minimizing the odds of missing problems you could’ve gotten right. After all, those are the problems you have control over, and those are the problems that can actually affect your score. And how do you guarantee you get them right? The secret is time.
Every time you guess on a problem that doesn’t matter, you’re buying yourself more time for the problems that really do matter. In fact, if you could somehow predict which 18 questions you were going to miss on the Quant section, and guess on them instantly, you’d have nearly four minutes per question to finish the rest of the section — and on top of that, you’d probably get 20% of your guesses right by accident! You’d be guaranteed the score you deserve, since 4 minutes is enough time to be absolutely certain that you won’t make any easy mistakes.
But is that actually possible? How could you possibly tell right away that a problem isn’t important? Check out the next article in this series for a simple process that’ll help you identify important GMAT problems quickly. ?
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Chelsey Cooley
is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Seattle, Washington. Chelsey always followed her heart when it came to her education. Luckily, her heart led her straight to the perfect background for GMAT and GRE teaching: she has undergraduate degrees in mathematics and history, a master’s degree in linguistics, a 790 on the GMAT, and a perfect 170/170 on the GRE. Check out Chelsey’s upcoming GMAT prep offerings here.