General test-taking strategies

These general test-taking strategies always help:

• Unanswered questions are counted as incorrect, so answer every question. If you don’t know an answer or you’re running out of time, make your best guess.

• Annotate word problems so you can identify the key information quickly and solve them accurately.

• If you don’t understand a question, guess and move on. Save your time for questions you’re more likely to solve.

• Watch for words that are bolded, italicized, or in ALL CAPS. These words often signal important conditions or restrictions. If you miss them, you may answer a different question than the one being asked.

• Use your calculator whenever it helps, even for simple arithmetic, to reduce careless calculation errors.

• Treat choices like “cannot be determined” as real possibilities. They’re just as likely to be correct as any other option.

• If you can’t remember the details of a formula, use what you do know to make an educated guess. A reasoned guess based on the situation is better than a random guess.

• If you feel lost or impatient on a question, pause and backtrack to the given facts and any relevant formulas. Then move forward one step at a time.

• Some questions use variables like $a$, $b$, and $c$ and describe them as “some number,” “any positive number,” or something similar. In these cases, you can often test the situation by choosing a number that meets the requirement. For example, if a question refers to “any positive whole number $a$,” you might plug in $1$ for $a$.