Should I omit questions on the SAT test?
Any good athlete or coach knows that you don’t go into a big game without a great strategy. You practice hard, eat and sleep well, and walk onto the field on game day with a proven playbook. When it comes to the SAT Test, omitting a question represents one of the best “plays” you can run. Proven fact: Omitting questions raises your SAT test score.
Success in omitting comes down to knowing when to do it, and at CATES we advise a pretty aggressive approach. The multiple choice questions on the SAT Test feature five answer choices. While some people say you should guess if you can eliminate one of these five, you should probably opt to omit when you cannot eliminate three of the five answer choices on a given SAT Test question. At CATES, we have discovered with our students that omitting according to this “rule of three” can sometimes make the difference between a score of 590 and one of 610. At the higher end of the scale in the Critical Reading, for example, one question could be the difference between a 760 and an 800!
Why? The SAT test does not deduct points for omitting. This means that if you leave a question blank, you do not lose or gain any points, and your SAT Test score remains unaffected. If you guess correctly, you gain a point – the best case scenario. However, if you guess incorrectly, you lose a quarter of a point. So if you find yourself stuck with more than two possible answer choices, we at CATES say: walk away. Think of omission your friend on the SAT Test, while anything worse than 50/50 odds as your nemesis.
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What is the Experimental Section on the SAT Test? Why is it there?
The SAT Test consists of three sections: Reading, Writing, and Math. Each of these sections gets subsequently divided on the test itself into three sub-sections. Math breaks down into one 20 question section, one 18 question section, and one 16 question section. The writing portion of the test constitutes an essay, one 35 question section, and one 14 question section. Lastly, the reading section breaks down into two 24 question sections, and one 19 question section. These nine sections make up the scored portion of the SAT Test.
Yet, you’ll notice when you take the SAT Test that you have to complete ten sections.
One of the sections on every SAT Test is an experimental section. This extra section, which the College Board (the administrators of the SAT Test) inserts into the SAT Test, allows the test-makers to try out new questions for future SAT Tests.
Luckily for you, your performance in this section does not factor into your scoring. So how do you know which is the experimental section? Well, you don’t. You have no way of telling which section on the SAT Test is the experimental one. At the end of the test you can evaluate if you completed 4 sections of either reading, writing, or math, but you have no way of knowing which exact section was the experimental one. Thus, when taking the SAT Test, treat each section as if it counts, because chances are, it does. In fact, every single student we have worked with who thought they knew for sure which section was experimental has been wrong!
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