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What's your guessing strategy?

Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 4:36 pm
by honestabe84
So you've run out of time on any given section.......What letter do you guess?

I've been taking Powerscore's advice and have guessing "D". However, it seems like I get the answer wrong more often than I should (more than 80% of the time).

Re: What's your guessing strategy?

Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 4:41 pm
by mazzini
No strategy will work better than just taking B or D. Sometimes you get lucky and sometimes you don't. I suggest never running out of time by practicing on a 25-27 minute timer per section. You get super fast. That being said, I guessed B when I was forced to guess on my first shot at the LSAT and didn't get anything I guessed at correct.

Re: What's your guessing strategy?

Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 4:45 pm
by dakatz
honestabe84 wrote:So you've run out of time on any given section.......What letter do you guess?

I've been taking Powerscore's advice and have guessing "D". However, it seems like I get the answer wrong more often than I should (more than 80% of the time).
Look at your scantron answer sheet and look at all the answers around that question. If you have it down to A and D, and you haven't had an A in ten questions, then I would be more likely to go with A than D. For example, on my real test, there were 2 very tough questions toward the end. I hadn't picked B in forever. I had a feeling that at least one of these two questions would have B as the answer. So I put B for both. And as expected, I got one of the two questions right, without wasting much time. So look at the context of your answer sheet. (Obviously this strategy only hold up if you typically get most questions right)

Re: What's your guessing strategy?

Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 4:51 pm
by honestabe84
dakatz wrote:
honestabe84 wrote:So you've run out of time on any given section.......What letter do you guess?

I've been taking Powerscore's advice and have guessing "D". However, it seems like I get the answer wrong more often than I should (more than 80% of the time).
Look at your scantron answer sheet and look at all the answers around that question. If you have it down to A and D, and you haven't had an A in ten questions, then I would be more likely to go with A than D. For example, on my real test, there were 2 very tough questions toward the end. I hadn't picked B in forever. I had a feeling that at least one of these two questions would have B as the answer. So I put B for both. And as expected, I got one of the two questions right, without wasting much time. So look at the context of your answer sheet. (Obviously this strategy only hold up if you typically get most questions right)
Well is it true that if you haven't chosen a letter in a while then it is more likely to be right than a letter that you have chosen a lot (assuming, of course, that you got your past answers correct).

For example, if you had three "D"s in the past five questions, does it make it any more unlikely that your next answer will not be "D"?

Re: What's your guessing strategy?

Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 4:53 pm
by clintonius
Statistically you are likely to see an approximately equal number of A, B, C, D and E choices comprising the correct answers on the test. Glance at your scantron and see if you are lean on one of those possibilities, then fill that in (say you don't seem to have as many Bs as you'd expect -- guess B).

Re: What's your guessing strategy?

Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 4:56 pm
by Shrimps
clintonius wrote:Statistically you are likely to see an approximately equal number of A, B, C, D and E choices comprising the correct answers on the test. Glance at your scantron and see if you are lean on one of those possibilities, then fill that in (say you don't seem to have as many Bs as you'd expect -- guess B).
Not exactly true: there are fewer A answers than expected. Anyway, can anyone compile the stats for the last 5 answers for each section for PT's 50-59? Perhaps the LSAC people have moved away from overusing D in the last questions, due to just about everyone knowing about it by now. Perhaps they've moved onto C or E.

Re: What's your guessing strategy?

Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 4:58 pm
by 09042014
honestabe84 wrote:
Well is it true that if you haven't chosen a letter in a while then it is more likely to be right than a letter that you have chosen a lot (assuming, of course, that you got your past answers correct).

For example, if you had three "D"s in the past five questions, does it make it any more unlikely that your next answer will not be "D"?
It the answers are randomly assigned no it is not true that if you haven't chosen a number its more likely.

But the answers aren't randomly assigned. They assign them to make the answer harder or easier.

For LG, the powerscore bible says that C is the common answer for the first three games, and D is the most common for the last game.

For LR D is the most common answer.

I don't have the RC bible, but I'd guess C or D.

Re: What's your guessing strategy?

Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 5:01 pm
by dakatz
In my Testmasters class, they gave us a breakdown of how often each answer choice occurs. The results dispelled any myth that any letter is "more likely" to be the answer than the others. Each answer choice was within a percentage point of 20%, as one would expect in a 1 out of 5 scenario. I believe D happened about 20.5% of the time. So honestly, its a completely insignificant difference.

Re: What's your guessing strategy?

Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 5:10 pm
by clintonius
Shrimps wrote:
clintonius wrote:Statistically you are likely to see an approximately equal number of A, B, C, D and E choices comprising the correct answers on the test. Glance at your scantron and see if you are lean on one of those possibilities, then fill that in (say you don't seem to have as many Bs as you'd expect -- guess B).
Not exactly true: there are fewer A answers than expected.
True, but not signficantly so, per dakatz's response above.

Re: What's your guessing strategy?

Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 5:16 pm
by Reinhardt
Especially if you didn't have a chance to do, say, an entire game or an entire reading passage, you should guess the least used letter in the section. Yes, BCD are the most common and E becomes more common at the end or whatever, but the more important statistic is that all five letters are used in somewhat the same frequency. If you've had six Ds that you're pretty confident are correct, and only two As, you need to guess A.

Re: What's your guessing strategy?

Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 5:22 pm
by bp colin
I was really bored a while ago, and looked at LR data. PS is true about (D) being the most common, but that's looking at all questions. If you're talking about the last 3-5 questions (the ones people generally guess on), and are only looking at the last 5-10 years, then (C) has the edge, but only slightly.

http://moststronglysupported.com/2birds ... g-edition/

If you're basing it on how you did on previous questions (you answered 10 (D)s, so you're going to guess something else), you're assuming that you got them all right. And while there are generally a roughly equal number of different AC letters per section, it's not always the case. In LR2 of Dec 08 (B) and (C) were right 3 times each. The time you spend trying to figure out which letter you used the least would be better spent on frantically reading one more question.

Again this is just for LR. Oh, and it doesn't include Dec 09.

Re: What's your guessing strategy?

Posted: Wed Mar 31, 2010 5:23 pm
by KibblesAndVick
If you don't have enough time to read every question and form a minimally educated guess you're doing it wrong. You would be much better off speeding up on a few questions and buying enough time to skim what you can't fully consider. It doesn't take much of your time to improve beyond 20% accuracy. You should be able to eliminate one or two of the answers almost immediately. After that you aren't going to be able to game the system with guessing. Just pick one and pick it quickly.