That said, randomly bubbling in the answers is statistically neither going to help you nor hurt you. Let’s say that you randomly bubbled in 5 questions. Statistically speaking, you would have gotten one of those right. That’s one point for you. However, the other four are wrong. So you lost 4*(1/4)=1 point. So you got one point and lost one point for a net gain/loss of 0 points. The same thing would have happened if you hadn’t answered any of them.

However, statistics often don’t model exactly what happens in real life. If you have to guess, it’s probably better to leave the bubbles blank than to randomly fill it out if you are completely unable to eliminate even a single answer choice. That way, you have no chance of answering all of them wrong and no chance of taking points away from the answers that you got right.

Every time you answer a question incorrectly, 1/4 (or .25) of a point gets deducted from the raw score.

If you don’t answer a question, you get 0 points, meaning you don’t lose or gain anything. But, this doesn’t mean that you should skip anything you don’t know. Sometimes, eliminating one or two answer choices can make all the difference. If you are truly stuck and don’t know where to begin, skipping will be your best bet. Try to aim for no more than 2 or 3 skipped questions per section (so about 20 skips overall, but the less the better!).

EDIT: I forgot to add this, so here it is: if you answer a question correctly, you get one point added to your RAW score. The raw score is then converted to a score on the 200-800 scale, but you don’t have to really worry about that.