<p>It’s an obvious fact that people will generally do better without the guessing penalty.</p>
<p>With the penalty, you have a 1/5 chance of getting a question correct (since there are 5 choices). So that means, in 5 questions, you would theoretically get one of them right. If you got one right and the other four wrong, that’s [1 - (1/4)*4] which is 0. That’s a fair score, because if you guessed on them, you didn’t really know the answer to any of them and don’t deserve any points.</p>
<p>Without the penalty, you would keep that 1 point for every 5 questions. This means you could guess on an entire 100-question exam and would theoretically get 20 points, whereas with the penalty, you’d get 0. It doesn’t seem like a huge difference, but it can add up. </p>
<p>Without the penalty, you are likely to spend less time on each question as well… because then you don’t have to worry about making sure you pick the right answer or if you should even pick an answer at all. </p>
<p>So as a result of all of this, scores are bound to increase.</p>
<p>The curve is set each year to distribute the scores a certain way so that there is a certain percentage of each score (1, 2, 3, 4, 5). As the test scores change, so will the curve. Everybody says that the curve will be “harder”, but in reality, it’s no different because the test itself is a bit easier, giving you the opportunity to earn more points than you would with the penalty.</p>
<p>It all balances out. You probably won’t see a significant difference in anything, to be honest.</p>
<p>You also don’t know if the difficulty of the questions is changing. Perhaps they are increasing the difficulty, making for an opposing force to this lack of a penalty.</p>