POE in Practice
The Process of Elimination (POE for short) enables you to make your guesses
really count. Incorrect answer choices are often easier to spot than correct ones.
Sometimes they are logically absurd; sometimes they are the opposite of the
correct answer. If you find a wrong answer, eliminate it. While you will rarely be
able to eliminate all of the incorrect answer choices, it is often possible to
eliminate one or two, and each time you can eliminate an answer choice, your
odds of guessing correctly get better.
A Moral Dilemma
What if someone approached
you moments
before the test began
and offered to give you
the answers to the test?
You’d be SHOCKED, right?
But what if we told you
that the person making
the offer was the proctor
running the test? The fact
is that every student who
takes the test gets to see
all the answers ahead of
time; they’re printed in the
test booklet, right underneath
each question.Try another question.
- What is the capital of Malawi?
(A) New York
(B) Lilongwe
(C) Paris
(D) Kinshasa
(E) Chicago
This time you could probably eliminate only three of the answer choices.
However, this means that you are down to a fifty-fifty guess—much better than
random guessing.
The Process of Elimination is a tremendously powerful tool. We refer to it in
every single chapter of this book, and explain how to use it on a variety of