Should You Go With Your First Instinct to Take Guesses in SAT Math?

In this article we will be discussing a piece of test taking advice that is often given in error. This piece of advice is to "go with your first instinct." Many people will tell you that after choosing an answer, you shouldn't go back and change that answer because your first instinct is usually correct. When it comes to the SAT we need to scrutinize this advice very carefully.

VERY IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not mistake understanding for instinct. If you actually have some understanding of the problem, you can use that to help choose your answer. This is very different from what I am describing here.

Now, going with your first instinct only makes sense for about one third of the SAT math questions. Roughly speaking, on any math section the first third of the questions is easy, the second third medium, and the last third hard.

Let's look at the 20 question multiple choice section in detail. In this case, roughly speaking, numbers 1 through 7 are easy, numbers 8 through 14 are medium, and numbers 15 through 20 are hard.

Basically you should go with your instinct on questions 1 through 7, but not on the rest of the questions.

In fact, for those last 6 questions you are better off going AGAINST your instinct. In other words, if you have no idea how to do number 17, but your instinct is telling you that the answer is B, then you should actually eliminate choice B and take a guess from the remaining four choices. This is one example of using the technique of Quasi-elimination.

Going against your instinct may sound like a crazy strategy, but if you understand how the SAT is made, it actually makes perfect sense.

Each SAT has an experimental section. This extra section may be math or verbal, and it is not graded. It is used to determine the difficulty level of each question so that these questions can be placed properly on a future SAT. If one of these questions is answered correctly by most students it becomes an easy question and it gets placed in the first third of a math section. If this question is answered incorrectly by most students, it becomes a hard question and it gets placed in the last third of a math section.

So a question became number 17 because most students got it wrong on an experimental section. Many of these students used their instinct to get a wrong answer. They were tricked. This is why your instinct will fail most of the time on these hard questions. On the medium questions your instinct will fail some of the time - enough that it shouldn't be used.

 
Best of luck,