Why Leave Blanks on SAT?

ttparent
Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:18:57 +0000

Generally, if you can eliminate and narrow down the choices, then it is to your advantage probabilistically to answer one of the remaining choices. Most prep book agrees that you should go ahead and answer in this situation. However, if you cannot eliminate any choices like when time runs out at the end of the test and you don’t have time to read the remaining questions, it is probably better to leave them blank.

Let’s say you have 2 questions left at the end of the section when time runs out. You have 1/25 chance of getting 2 points by guessing and 16/25 chance of loosing 0.5 points. It all evens out with large sample of questions but that 0.5 points off can be 20-30 points on the scaled score like previous poster said.