Is there a benefit for guessing on questions you don’t know on either test?
Here is everything you need to know about guessing on the SAT vs ACT. We’ve included a detailed analysis which tests two hypotheses on “how to guess” appropriately.
Most answers to the question, as listed here, are correct: no guessing penalty on either the SAT or ACT.
First, know that the “Letter of the Day” method, is incorrect.
Guess any letter for any question. It doesn’t matter if you guess A,B,A,B or A,A,A,A or any variation. Your expected number of correct answers are equal—actually, you’ll actually do sliiightly better by guessing randomly on every question.
Easy empirical proof:
They’re the same.
But if you want to get technical. The SAT and ACT are not bound to have an equal distribution of each answer. That is, if there are 20 questions, they do not have to have 5, ‘A’s; 5, ‘B’s; etc. They could easily have a correct answer distribution that was 7, ‘A’s; 3, ‘B’s; etc.
If you used the ‘Letter of the Day’ method and chose incorrectly, then you could easily find yourself limiting the number of correct answers you chose.
It is better to guess randomly at each question you don’t know.