Guessing and Scoring, SAT Chemistry Review

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[MrDGenova]

Technically, if you can eliminate even one answer, guessing has a higher expected value than not guessing.  If there are 4 questions where you can only narrow it to 4 possibilities, on average you'll get 1 of the questions right and 3 wrong.  So, over those 4 questions, you will get +1 from the correct, and -3/4 for the 3 wrong, for a net gain of +1/4.  However, guessing in this situation does inject a lot more variance into your test.  It could be argued that with such a small sample of questions, it may not be worth guessing to gain that 1/4 of a point on your raw score.  So it is certainly better if you can narrow it to 2 or 3, and you should DEFINITELY guess if you can (unless you usually have trouble finishing the test and you could use the time it takes to guess to solve a problem you'd probably get)