GMAT Guessing Strategies

Reading Time: 14 minutes

Last Updated on May 15, 2023

It may seem counterintuitive, but any smart GMAT test-taking strategy should include strategies for guessing on the GMAT. Of course, no one wants to have a reason to employ their guessing strategies on test day, but as the saying goes, “Hope for the best; prepare for the worst.” I know that we all hope to answer every question we see on the GMAT in the allotted time. However, the reality is that doing so is not always possible. Thus, guessing is a part of any GMAT.

So, let’s talk about some practical, flexible, and research-backed GMAT guessing strategies to maximize your score.

Here are the topics we’ll cover:

• Educated Guessing vs. Random Guessing
• Educated Guessing
  • When to Make Educated Guesses
    • Example of Taking an Educated Guess
• The Art of Letting Go
  • Understanding Your Strengths and Weaknesses
• Losing the Battle to Win the War
  • One Small Caveat
• Random Guessing
  • Random Guessing to Catch Up on Time
  • The Alternative to Random Guessing to Catch Up on Time
  • A Random Guess Could be a Question You Could Correctly Answer
  • If You Are Completely Stumped, Then Randomly Guess
  • Random Guessing at the End of a Section
    • Dealing With the Final Question in a Section
• Key Takeaways: Be Prepared to Guess on the GMAT
• Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)
  • Is there a Penalty for Guessing on the GMAT?
  • On the GMAT, how many questions can I guess on and still get a good score?
• What’s Next?

To start, let’s discuss the difference between the two main guessing strategies that test-takers employ: educated guessing and random guessing.

Educated Guessing vs. Random Guessing

There are two basic types of guessing that test-takers have in their arsenal for the GMAT: educated guessing and random guessing. To start, we will discuss educated guessing and look at an example in which taking an educated guess is necessary.

Educated Guessing

Educated guessing is what you do when you know enough about a question to eliminate some answer choices. Still, you aren’t sure what the correct answer is, and getting to that answer will require too much time or perhaps be beyond your capabilities.

Maybe you’re stuck deciding between two answer choices. Or maybe you’ve been able to eliminate only one choice confidently. Or you take educated guess because you are running out of time or spending too long on a particular question. Either way, you take your best guess at the correct answer, based on your work so far, and move on.

When to Make Educated Guesses

For obvious reasons, educated guessing is always preferable to random guessing. After all, if you have five answers to select, you have only a 1 in 5 chance of choosing correctly. But if you have, for example, only three answers to choose from, then your odds just got significantly better.

So, if you’re struggling to make any headway on a question, or you realize you’re taking an inordinate amount of time to figure a question out, and you decide you need to guess, your best bet is to try to quickly eliminate some answers rather than randomly guess. Even if you can eliminate only one answer, or if you feel 70% or 60% certain that 2 or 3 answers are wrong, you’re still giving yourself a better shot at guessing correctly. It’s OK that when making an educated guess you may not always be totally confident in your answer.

However, if based on your know-how and the work you’ve done so far, you feel reasonably confident that a particular answer is more likely wrong than another answer, for the purposes of educated guessing, you’ve still done your best to narrow your choices. The key point is to assess and make your best guess quickly.

We can demonstrate how you might take an educated guess. Let’s say you made a math mistake in the following problem. Then you had no choice but to take an educated guess and move on to the next problem.

Example of Taking an Educated Guess

Scenario:

Let’s say when you first see this problem, you feel quite confident that you know how to solve it. However, after close to 2 minutes, you realize that you have not come up with the correct answer, and because you cannot spot your mistake, you don’t think it’s worth it to keep grinding through the problem.

In this case, you can at least employ your knowledge of weighted averages to understand that the correct answer must be between 2 and 9 years, and because there are more cats than dogs, the correct answer will be closer to 2 than to 9.

Thus, 3 and 5 are the two possible answers. So, at least you now have a 50% shot at a correct answer. This is an example of using your previous knowledge about a topic and making an educated guess to try to come up with the correct answer. (Also, if you are wondering, the weighted average of the ages is 3.16, so the correct answer is 3.)

Let’s discuss educated guesses in more detail by looking at some scenarios in which making educated guesses is the right move.

The Art of Letting Go

One uncomfortable fact about the GMAT is that you must be comfortable letting go of questions you cannot solve. To that end, a significant part of being prepared for the GMAT is knowing your strengths and weaknesses. It’s valuable to have a clear understanding your strengths and weaknesses on a micro question level.

Understanding Your Strengths and Weaknesses

Knowing your strengths and weaknesses down to the concept level allows you to deploy your GMAT guessing strategies strategically. For instance, let’s say that question 12 in the Quantitative section is a very challenging probability question. Furthermore it’s similar to ones that you’ve struggled with in the past. You spend about 30 to 45 seconds giving the problem your best possible effort. After that time, if the problem is unfolding just as the past problems like it have – not well – you eliminate some answers that can’t be correct, and then make an educated guess.

What have you accomplished by deploying educated guessing in this scenario? For one, you have not wasted your time on a problem you would probably get wrong, but you can still feel confident that you tried your best. Secondly, you’ve banked 1:15 to 1:30 of extra time going into question 13, time you can use to fight battles you’re more likely to win. And if you were already behind on time, the 1:30 has helped you get back on track.

So, when you see GMAT questions that you know you struggle with, give them a reasonable attempt. However, if you’re lost or confused by the question, then take an educated guess! By strategically guessing, you’ll preserve energy and brainpower and gain valuable time to solve questions that you can answer correctly.

Now, let’s talk about those times when you may feel as though you really could answer a question if you kept working on it.

Losing the Battle to Win the War

There may be times when you encounter a problem that you feel you can solve. However, because you either make a minor calculation mistake or careless error, you don’t come up with the correct answer.

I realize that your brain may be telling you that you CAN answer the question. However, regardless of whether you can answer the question correctly, you can’t afford to spend 5 minutes doing so. At that point, it wouldn’t matter that you got the question correct because you’d probably end up running out of time and having to guess on later questions.

So, if you are already 2 to 3 minutes into the question and for the life of you cannot find your error or come up with the correct answer, then you have no choice but to take an educated guess and keep things moving.

One Small Caveat

While the strategy above is certainly sound consider another scenario. If you’ve spent 2 to 3 minutes on a question but are close to an answer, finish the question. Do so, even if you are behind the clock. I know you can’t spend 5 minutes trying to decipher every question.

However, sometimes, by giving yourself just a few extra seconds, you may be able to accurately answer the question rather than make a guess. The overall point is that if you are not close to an answer, you can’t allow too much time to slip away before you make the executive decision to take your best guess and move on.

You must be disciplined. You must be willing to lose a battle here or there to maximize your chances of winning the GMAT war. If you’re struggling to answer a question and are low on time then make the smart decision. Even if every bone in your body is telling you that you can answer the question, take a guess and keep moving.

Remember, the GMAT isn’t just about answering questions correctly; it’s about answering questions correctly in the time allotted.

So, we know that educated guessing may sometimes be a “necessary evil” on the GMAT. But what about random guessing? Does it ever help your score? Let’s discuss.

Random Guessing

Random guessing happens when you have no idea how to answer a question or no time to answer it. In other words, there is no knowledge or work behind your guess — it’s essentially the same as closing your eyes and pointing at a random answer on the computer screen.

Let’s discuss some scenarios in which a student may randomly guess and whether doing so is beneficial.

Random Guessing to Catch up on Time

A typical scenario for test-takers is that they have mismanaged their time on test day. Thus, they’re starting to get worryingly behind on the clock. In this scenario, test-takers often employ the strategy of blindly “sacrificing” questions to catch up on time. In other words, they randomly guess on the next 1 or 2 questions they see. They do this because they feel that if they don’t, they are in danger of running out of time and having to leave a higher number of questions blank at the end of the section. This is a risky strategy!

I call this strategy risky because you have no way of accurately assessing whether the GMAT considers a question easy, hard, or something in between. A question that seems difficult to you may be fairly straightforward for many other test-takers and vice versa. So, since you cannot gauge the difficulty level of a question, you have no way of knowing how much an incorrect random guess will hurt your score.

For instance, your score could take a nosedive if you randomly guess an easy question — or multiple easy questions. On the other hand, randomly guessing on hard-level questions that the test expects you to get wrong might not seriously hurt your score. (Check out this article for more on how the GMAT scoring algorithm works.)

The Alternative to Random Guessing to Catch Up on Time

If you are aware that you are behind on the clock, then rather than randomly guessing to catch up on time, understand that there are questions you can answer quickly! Let’s consider the following quant example:

Let’s say you land on this question, and you know that you are behind on the clock. Well, if you understand how patterns of units digits work, then within no more than 10 seconds, you should see that the correct answer must have a units digit of 6, and thus the correct answer is B. This is a perfect example of how you can organically catch up on time without having to resort to a random guess.

Let’s discuss another risk of randomly guessing.

A Random Guess Could be a Question You Could Correctly Answer

It is never prudent to throw away questions that you may be able to answer quickly. Instead, if you’re running behind, try to catch up by making an educated guess on a question (or two) that you would have difficulty correctly answering anyway. Don’t randomly guess on whatever question you happen to be on because you’re behind on the clock. When a question appears on your computer screen, you want to at least assess whether it’s something you may be able to answer. You don’t want to simply click a random answer and move on.

So, we have discussed a number of scenarios in which random guessing is not ideal. Now let’s discuss two scenarios in which it makes sense to make a random guess.

If You Are Completely Stumped, Then Randomly Guess

No matter how hard you prepare for the GMAT, there may be a time during your exam when you see a question you have no idea how to answer. In such a case, taking a random guess is ideal. After all, why spend 1 to 2 minutes on a question that you have a very slim likelihood of correctly answering? To illustrate this point, let’s look at the following combination example.

If you have been studying for the GMAT for some time, you may recognize the example above as a basic combination question. However, let’s say combinations is a topic you hate or a topic you did not properly learn, and this question pops up on your GMAT. Upon seeing it, you would quickly realize that you have no shot of correctly answering the question (outside of a guess), right? So, this is a time when taking a random guess is what you need to do! Take a guess and keep things moving.

In case you’re wondering, the solution is below.

Since we need to choose 3 people from 18, we need to calculate the following:

18C3 = (18 x 17 x 16)/(3 x 2 x 1) = 3 x 17 x 16 = 816

The answer is B.

Let’s discuss one other scenario in which taking a random guess is ideal: at the end of a section.

Random Guessing at the End of a Section

Another scenario in which random guessing is actually a wise strategy is when you have questions left at the end of a section but little time to answer them.

Hey, we have all been there. You look at the clock, and you have twenty seconds left and three questions to answer. In that case, throw caution to the wind and randomly guess! The last thing you want to do is leave questions unanswered by the time the section expires. That said, you can use some strategy when answering the final question, even when running out of time. Let’s discuss how.

The last thing you want to do is leave questions unanswered by the time the section expires.

Dealing With the Final Question in a Section

A quirk of the GMAT exam is that, if you’ve selected an answer to the last question in a section but don’t hit “submit” before time runs out, your answer WILL be recorded. So, with that in mind, if you’re short on time when you reach the last question in a section, there is no reason not to select a random answer immediately and then work on finding the correct answer. That way, even if the timer runs out as you’re solving the problem, you still have an answer recorded, despite not having hit “submit.” Thus, you still have that 1 out of 5 shot at having answered correctly.

On the other hand, if you try to solve the problem without a provisional answer choice selected, and your time for the section runs out, you will have no shot at getting the question correct because you will have left the question blank.

Of course, if you still have a reasonable amount of time left when you reach the last question in a section, you don’t have to worry about choosing a random, provisional answer in case you run out of time. Certainly, if you think doing so could confuse you, stick to your normal order of completing the question. And if you do need to select a provisional answer because you’re running out of time, if you have enough time to solve the problem, make sure to change your selection to your real answer before you hit “submit.”

Key Takeaways: Be Prepared to Guess on the GMAT

As you have learned in this article, guessing, whether educated or random, is a part of test day. So, you should come into your test with firm strategies for when to strategically guess on questions. For example, take the mindset that if something goes wrong, even in a question you should be able to answer, you are willing and able to guess and move on. Additionally, be clear about your weak areas, so that if you are in a place where you need to catch up on time and come to a question about a topic in which you know you are weak, you will have the confidence to guess on that question and keep things moving.

At the end of the day, the more prepared you are to guess on the GMAT, the better shot you will have at success on test day.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Is there a Penalty for Guessing on the GMAT?

There is no easy answer to this question. Part of the reason is that the GMAT is question-adaptive, and thus, guessing is not a linear activity. Add to this is the fact that the scoring algorithm has never been released, and so the effects of guessing cannot be accurately quantified.

On the GMAT, how many questions can I guess on and still get a good score?

There are too many factors bearing on the issue to give a definitive answer. Your best strategy is to be so well prepared that guessing plays an insignificant role during your exam! Learning as much as you can about GMAT scoring will help you develop your own guessing strategy.

What’s Next?

Smart test-takers will have many tools in their arsenal, including the knowledge of when and how to use guessing to their advantage. However, nothing beats having a strong foundation in all quant and verbal topics, using guessing only when necessary.

To get that strong foundation, you might want to read this article about maximizing your learning and retention while studying for the GMAT.