How To Guess On The GRE CAT

This is the last article in my three-part series on guessing strategies. We’ve already gone over guessing on the SAT and guessing on the LSAT, so now it’s time to tackle the weirdest guessing situation of them all: the GRE CAT.

Why is guessing on the GRE CAT so obnoxious? Because the GRE CAT is the most poorly designed standardized test in history, that’s why.

If you haven’t already done so, I strongly recommend you check out our free sample chapter on the shortcomings of the GRE CAT. That sample chapter covers all the stuff that’s wrong with the way the test is designed, and goes over the basic approach you’ll need to take when it comes to guessing on the GRE CAT. In this article, I’ll expand a little bit on that basic approach.

The main problem with guessing on the GRE CAT is that you have to answer every question on the test in order to see the next question; on top of that, you have to make any individual guess without being able to refer to other questions. This makes it impossible to avoid guessing, as you should on the SAT. You also can’t use a distributed-guessing approach like you should on the LSAT.

Guessing on the GRE CAT is a double whammy: In addition to the direct score-lowering effect of any individual wrong answer, enough wrong answers early on in a section will actually lock you out of a chance to both answer harder questions later on and raise your score significantly.

And don’t tell yourself you’ll be able to make it through the whole test without guessing at all. The odds of that happening are basically zero. Given the bizarre, obscure, unpredictable words that can appear on the verbal section, almost everybody guesses at least once, no matter how much vocabulary they’ve crammed. (And by the way, don’t cram any vocabulary–take a look at our test-prep white paper to see why that’s a bad idea.)

So the bottom line is that you’re almost certain to end up guessing on the GRE, one way or another. And that means you’ll need a guessing strategy. Actually, you’ll need multiple guessing strategies–one for each question type. Let’s go over them all, in ascending order of complexity.

Critical Reading Questions

We’ll get this question type out of the way early, since it’s the easiest one by far.

Why is that, you ask?

Because no well-trained test-taker should guess on a GRE Reading question :)

If you’re familiar with the rules and patterns of the GRE reading questions, you shouldn’t miss any of them. They’re very predictable and very repetitive.

(If you’re missing reading questions and you’d like to stop, consider the strategies in my GRE Strategy Guide.)

Quantitative Comparison Questions

These questions can be a little trickier, but they’re still relatively easy for a well-trained test-taker to handle.

For a well-trained test-taker, the only reason to guess on a GRE Math question is that you can’t figure out the “trick” behind the question. (Well-trained test-takers never have to worry about knowing all the math on the test, since they’ve prepared in advance by mastering all the math concepts the GRE CAT is allowed to ask them about.)

Many students make a crucial mistake when confronted by a difficult QC question: They try to do the math instead of trying to find the answer.

It might sound like I’m splitting hairs here, but there’s a really important distinction between the two.

All you need to do to answer a QC question is determine which quantity is larger. You can often do this without figuring out how big the quantities actually are. (In fact, on a lot of GRE Math questions it’s impossible to know how big the quantities are, even though you can still know which one is bigger.)

So guessing on a QC question can be easier than you might think. If you can’t see the trick behind the question, just take a step back from it and try to get a feel for the relative sizes of the quantities. Pay special attention to things like fractions and negative numbers, which are often thrown into QC questions to trip you up. Then go for it.

By the way, there’s one other reason that guessing on QC questions is slightly easier than guessing on most other questions–you have a 1 in 4 chance of being right, instead of the 1 in 5 chance you get for all the other question types.

Problem Solving Questions

Guessing on the problem solving questions is generally a little more challenging than guessing on the the QC questions, but you can tip the odds in your favor with the right strategies.

The most common guessing mistake that students make on these questions is something I call “ball-parking.” They try to solve a problem but come up with a solution that isn’t in the answer choices. Then, instead of starting the process over or checking their work for errors, they just “ball-park” the problem by picking the answer choice that’s closest to their solution.

This is the most commonly employed guessing strategy on GRE math questions, even though it practically guarantees you’ll get the answer wrong.

If you’re working on a problem-solving question and you end up with an answer that doesn’t appear in the answer choices, it only means one thing: You’ve made a huge mistake. And huge mistakes aren’t the basis for a successful guessing strategy.

When you’ve made a mistake like this, the first thing to do is go back and check your work. Look for errors in basic math, forgotten negative signs, illegible numbers, and so on. If you find a mistake, correct it and see how that affects your solution. If you can’t find a mistake, then you probably approached the question incorrectly.

If you can’t work the problem in a way that produces one of the answer choices for a solution, resist the temptation to ball-park the answer. Instead, look for standard GRE patterns in the relationships among the answer choices, and make your guess based on those relationships.

(How do you learn which patterns to look for? If you work with the test for long enough, you’ll start to see them. If you’d rather learn them more quickly, you can always check out my GRE Strategy Guide.)

A guess that’s based on answer choices and test patterns is always a better choice than a guess based on a failed solution to a math question.

Antonym, Analogy, and Sentence Completion questions

These questions are the trickiest ones to guess on. You won’t know all the words on some of the questions, particularly as you get better and better at the test, and see more and more obscure words as a result.

Because it’s impossible to memorize every single one of the obscure words (and word usages) you’ll see on the GRE in advance, getting better at these so-called “vocabulary” questions means learning to work with confidence in the midst of uncertainty.

For these questions, it’s important to draw a parallel with the QC questions we discussed above. Just like you should learn to answer QC questions without having to know the values of the quantities involved, you should learn to answer these “vocabulary” questions without having to know what the words mean. (This is why I recommend GRE vocabulary tools that teach you to figure out how words relate to each other, and not what words actually mean.)

For these questions, the line between guessing and strategizing begins to blur. Your best chance will come from relying on your knowledge of wrong answer patterns and your experience in discerning the relationships between the answer choices.

Overall guessing strategies

Of course, the way you use all of the above strategies will be affected by the amount of time you have left in a section, and how far along you are in the section. (If you don’t know why those two things are important, you haven’t read my sample chapter on the GRE CAT design. Shame on you! :) )

A final word on GRE Guessing

We’ve spent a lot of time in this article talking about guessing on the GRE CAT. Unfortunately, the CAT’s horrible design makes this kind of discussion necessary, because it punishes test-takers who lack a multi-dimensional guessing strategy.

But I don’t want to give the impression that guessing on the GRE CAT is the best thing you can do. Without question, you should learn the test’s rules and patterns and use them to approach every GRE question looking for one correct answer choice.

As with the SAT and LSAT guessing strategies that we’ve already discussed, these GRE guessing strategies are meant to be a fallback position, not a first line of defense. Getting a top score on any standardized test will require you to have a well thought-out plan for the guessing situations that will inevitably arise, but your goal should always be to avoid guessing whenever possible.