You can use the so-called guessing penalty to your advantage. You might have heard it said that
the SAT Subject Test has a “guessing penalty.” That’s a misnomer. It’s really a wrong-answer
penalty. If you guess wrong, you get a small penalty. If you guess right, you get full credit.
GUESSING RULE
Don’t guess, unless you can eliminate at least one answer choice. Don’t leave a question
blank unless you have absolutely no idea how to answer it.The fact is, if you can eliminate one or more answer choices as definitely wrong, you’ll turn the odds
in your favor and actually come out ahead by guessing. The fractional points that you lose are
meant to offset the points you might get “accidentally” by guessing the correct answer. With
practice, however, you’ll see that it’s often easy to eliminate several answer choices on some of the
questions.
The answer grid has no heart. It sounds simple, but it’s extremely important: Don’t make mistakes
filling out your answer grid. When time is short, it’s easy to get confused going back and forth
between your test booklet and your grid. If you know the answers, but misgrid, you won’t get the
points. Here’s how to avoid mistakes.
HIT THE SPOT
A common mistake is filling in all of the questions with the right answers—in the wrong
spots. Whenever you skip a question, circle it in your test booklet and make doubly sure that
you skip it on the answer grid as well.Always circle the questions you skip. Put a big circle in your test booklet around any question
numbers that you skip. When you go back, these questions will be easy to relocate. Also, if you
accidentally skip a box on the grid, you’ll be able to check your grid against your booklet to see
where you went wrong.