Educated Guessing Strategy for ISEE Math
The best-case scenario on the ISEE math sections is knowing how to do every problem. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen. So what do you do when you’re faced with a problem you don’t understand and you truly have no idea where to even begin?
The guessing strategy outlined below will increase the odds of getting a question right, even if you know nothing about the question and can’t eliminate any answer choices.
The key to this strategy is knowing one important fact about ISEE math questions: the answer choices are put in order from least to greatest (or occasionally greatest to least), whenever that is possible.
For instance, if the possible answers are 3, 7, 11, and 14, these will always be ordered the same way:
A) 3
B) 7
C) 11
D) 14
You will never see:
A) 11
B) 7
C) 14
D) 3
The guessing strategy hinges on that fact. To make sure that the question properly assesses a student’s knowledge, wrong answer choices represent a possible miscalculation or error that a student might make. It turns out that it’s very difficult to write a question with good wrong answer choices that are all higher or lower than the correct answer.
For instance, let’s consider a very simple problem: 3+2.
As the test writer, you want to write some wrong answers that represent errors a student might make.
- Maybe the student accidentally subtracts instead of adding: 3 – 2 = 1.
- Maybe the student miscalculates when counting on their fingers and ends up one off: 4.
- Maybe the student accidentally multiplies instead of adding: 3 x 2 = 6.
Now you have your four answer-choices: the correct answer, 5, and the three wrong choices, 1, 4, and 6. Notice that two of these are smaller than the correct answer, and one is larger.
Putting the choices in order and placing the question first, the whole problem would read:
What is 3+2?
A) 1
B) 4
C) 5
D) 6
If you’re stuck on a math question with answer choices that are all numbers, pick one of the middle choices, B or C. It’s statistically more likely that one of these will be the right answer.
At first glance, this may not seem quite right – there should probably be an approximately equal number of answers for each letter, right? Absolutely! So where do those extra As and Ds come in?
Not all of the math questions have answer choices that are all just numbers.
Some of them will have algebraic expressions, like “2x+3”, or lists of numbers, like “-3, 7, 5, 2”.
For all of these questions, test writers have to make up for the abundance of questions with answer choices B and C. These questions with non-ordered answers are more likely to have the correct answer choice be A or D to balance the other questions.
If you’re stuck on a math question with answer choices that are not numbers, pick either A or D. It’s statistically more likely that one of those will be the right answer.
While this guessing strategy can be helpful, ideally you won’t have to guess on too many questions. To limit the amount of guessing you have to do on test day, improve your understanding with personalized ISEE prep.
Originally published on August 24, 2016. Updated on January 13, 2025.
