How Many Questions Should You Answer?

This seems like a strange question. Most students, especially good students, try to answer all the questions on a test. Occasionally, they might have to leave out a question because they get stuck, but they never start a test planning to pace themselves in such a way as to omit 10, 15, or 20 percent of the questions intentionally. Surprisingly, this is precisely what many students should do on the Math 1 test. The biggest mistake most students make when taking this test is trying to answer too many questions. It is far better to go slowly, answering fewer questions and getting most of them right than to rush through the test answering all the questions but getting many of them wrong.

Because nothing lowers one’s score more than making careless mistakes on easy questions and because a major cause of careless errors is rushing to finish, take the test slowly enough to be accurate, even if you don’t get to finish.

So, exactly how many questions should you answer? Obviously, the answer to this question depends on your goal. If you are an outstanding math student and your goal is to get an 800, then not only do you have to answer all 50 questions, you have to answer them correctly. If, on the other hand, your goal is to earn a 650, then, as you can see from the conversion chart on page 8, you could answer fewer than 40 questions and even miss a few.

To see why this is so, consider the following situation. Suppose Bob took the Math 1 test, answered all 50 questions, and got 34 right and 16 wrong. Then his raw score would be 30 (34 points for the 34 right answers minus $\frac{16}{4}=4$ points for the 16 wrong answers), and his scaled score would be 600. Probably among the 16 questions he missed were a few that he just didn’t know how to solve. It is also likely that several of his mistakes were careless. Especially during the last 10 or 15 minutes, he probably went too fast trying to finish and missed questions he could have gotten right had he worked more slowly and more carefully. A likely scenario is that in the first 30 questions, when he was not rushing, he got about 26 right and 4 wrong. On the last 20 questions, in contrast, when he was going too fast, he got about 8 right and 12 wrong.

TIP

The biggest mistake that most students make is trying to answer too many questions.

What if he had worked as slowly and as accurately at the end of the test as he had at the beginning of the test? He would have run out of time. However, his score would have been higher. Suppose in the last 20 questions he omitted 8, answering only 12, but getting 10 right and 2 wrong. Then in total he would have had 36 right answers and 6 wrong ones. His raw score would have been 35 and his scaled score a 650. By slowing down and answering fewer questions, his score would have increased by 50 points!

SAMPLE MATH 1 CONVERSION CHART

Raw Score	Scaled Score	Raw Score	Scaled Score	Raw Score	Scaled Score
50 49 48 47 46 45 44 43 42 41 40 39 38 37 36 35 34 33 32 31	800 790 780 770 760 750 740 730 720 710 700 690 680 670 660 650 640 630 620 610	30 29 28 27 26 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11	600 590 580 570 560 550 540 530 520 510 500 490 480 470 460 450 440 430 420 410	10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 –1 –2 –3 –4 –5 –6 –7 –8 –9 or less	400 390 380 370 360 350 340 330 320 310 300 290 280 270 260 250 240 230 220 200

Which Questions Should You Answer?

Every question has the same raw score value: 1 point. You get the same 1 point for a correct answer to an easy question, which you could answer in less than 30 seconds, as you do for a correct answer to a hard question, which might take you more than three minutes to answer. Therefore, if you are not going to answer all the questions, then you should answer the easy and moderately difficult ones and leave out the hardest ones.

Of course, to follow this advice, you need to know which questions are easy and which ones are hard. Fortunately, that is not a problem. The first ones are the easiest, the last ones are the hardest. In general, the questions on the Math 1 test go in order from easy to difficult.

On a recent actual Math 1 test, on questions 1–10, the average percentage of students answering a particular question correctly was 82 percent, and on questions 41–50 the average percentage of students answering a particular question correctly was 28 percent. Of questions 1–27, every question was answered correctly by more than 60 percent of the students taking the test; of questions 28–50, not one question was answered correctly by at least 60 percent of the students.

You may not find question 30 to be harder than question 26—especially if you are better in algebra than geometry and question 30 is on algebra and question 26 is on geometry. However, you will definitely find questions 10–19 to be easier than questions 20–29, which in turn will be significantly easier than questions 30–39.