When to Guess & When to Skip GMAT Questions
(We published the original version of this post way back in 2010, and even though the GMAT has changed a bit since then, the general ideas are still relevant to the 2021 version of the GMAT. So we’ve refreshed the article a bit, but kept most of the punchlines intact. Enjoy!)
Conventional wisdom says that you should always finish every question on the GMAT, and that the algorithm will thrash you silly if you don’t. It even said so in the 12th edition of the GMAT Official Guide:
F[act] — There is a severe penalty for not completing the GMAT test.
If you are stumped by a question, give it your best guess and move on…. If you don’t finish the test, your score will be reduced greatly.
In some of the newer versions of the GMAT Official Guide, there’s a little bit of extra explanation:
If you don’t finish the test, your score will be reduced. Failing to answer five verbal questions, for example, could reduce your score from the 91st percentile to the 77th percentile.
So that begs the question: will failing to answer questions at the end of the test wreck your GMAT score? Are you better off guessing?
Omitting won’t make or break your GMAT score
Thanks to that particular part of the GMAT Official Guide, a lot of GMAT students seem to think that they’ll face imminent GMAT doom if they don’t finish every single question. As GMAT tutors, we often field anguished calls from prospective students who swear that their GMAT scores would have been much higher if they hadn’t run out of time before they had a chance to answer question #31 on the quant section, or question #36 on the verbal section.
The idea in many test-takers heads is that guessing on those final few questions is FAR better than not answering them at all.
And guess what? According to an old post from the official GMAT blog (which was actually interesting for a few minutes back in 2010), guessing doesn’t improve your GMAT score more than omitting the questions entirely.
Here’s a nice little graph from GMAC’s study on guessing vs. omitting questions on the verbal section of the GMAT:
On verbal, it doesn’t seem to matter whether you guess on those last few questions or omit them. Obviously, it’s not wonderful to run out of time on the GMAT — and we’ll say more about how to avoid running out of time in a moment. But if you do run short on time, there’s no need to agonize over the decision of whether to guess or omit those last few questions.
The results are broadly similar on quant:
I wouldn’t overthink this data. The bottom line is that under some circumstances, guessing might actually be worse than omitting questions on quant — and either way, the difference isn’t huge.
If you’re a glutton for GMAT-related data, pdf of the entire study is still available on GMAC’s website.
The takeaway is that it doesn’t really matter whether you guess or omit questions on the GMAT. So whatever you do, don’t freak out if you can’t answer the last question or two on a GMAT test section.
How to manage your time on the GMAT
Of course, you’re MUCH better off if you don’t run out of time on the GMAT at all, and never have to worry about whether to guess or omit questions at the end of a test section.