Hello everyone:
I am going to respectfully disagree with the conclusion that "It can't hurt
to guess, even if you are clueless." Are you applying this to the psychology
GRE, where it might be safe to assume that anyone taking the test has some
college-level course work in psychology? Or are you applying the conclusion
across all five choice Multiple Choice items?
I have a number of years' experience as a private SAT tutor, and I think the
decision to guess or leave it blank needs to be viewed in context. A student
with a limited vocabulary taking the Verbal SAT is really well advise to skip
the hardest items. The lost quarter-points quickly add up and cancel out the
gains in the easy and medium part of the test. As the SAT Math test is a test
of reasoning, with very little Math, and a lot of tricky, almost deviously
written items, it is often the case that scores go up when students are
coached to skip the most difficult items.
I also am of the opinion that what is tested on the SAT and many other
reasoning tests and what is taught in most American classrooms rarely
intersects - but that's a story for a different day, and list, perhaps.
Nancy Melucci
Los Angeles Harbor College
