The rule
Nothing is deducted for a wrong answer. Your raw score is the number of questions you got right, full stop. That means a blank and a wrong answer are worth exactly the same, and a guess is strictly better than a blank.
This was not always true. The old pre 2016 SAT subtracted a quarter point for wrong multiple choice answers, which is where the advice to skip hard questions came from. That advice is now simply wrong, and you will still see it repeated.
While researching a topic, a student has taken the following notes: - Ecologist Priya Raman studied crows in three city parks. - She left small piles of walnuts near crosswalks. - She recorded 412 instances of crows dropping nuts onto the road. - In 78 percent of those instances, the crow waited for the traffic signal to stop cars before retrieving the nut.
The student wants to present Raman's main finding. Which choice most effectively uses relevant information from the notes to accomplish this goal?
Guessing well instead of guessing randomly
Four choices means a random guess is right about a quarter of the time. Eliminating one wrong option takes that to about a third, and eliminating two takes it to about half. Those are real gains across a section, so spending fifteen seconds on elimination before you guess is usually worth it.
Use the answer eliminator tool in Bluebook rather than doing it in your head. Crossing choices off on screen stops you from re-reading an option you already ruled out, which is where most of the lost time on hard questions goes.
What to eliminate on Math
Estimate before you eliminate. If you can tell the answer must be positive, or must be less than 10, or must be a whole number, that usually kills one or two choices immediately.
Check units and magnitude. On word problems the wrong answers often come from a specific mistake, like forgetting to convert hours to minutes, which means a choice that is exactly 60 times another one is a clue about what the right answer is not.
Plug in the choices when the algebra is stuck. On multiple choice you can test options directly. Start in the middle so one test tells you which direction to go. This does not work on grid-ins, where you still type your best numeric guess.
What to eliminate on Reading and Writing
Kill anything that is true but does not answer the question asked. On rhetorical synthesis this is the single most common wrong answer type, and there are usually two of them.
Kill anything with an extreme word that the passage does not support, like always, never, proves, or impossible. Short passages rarely justify absolute claims.
Kill anything that brings in outside information. If a detail is not in the passage, it is not the answer, no matter how reasonable it sounds.
Triage under the timer
Set a personal cutoff. At about 71 seconds per Reading and Writing question and about 95 seconds per Math question, a question that has taken twice that long is costing you a different question you could have answered.
When you hit the cutoff, eliminate what you can, pick the best remaining option, flag it, and move on. The flag means you can come back with leftover time, and the answer you already entered means the clock running out does not cost you a blank.
With one minute left in a module, stop working and fill in every unanswered question. Do this as a reflex. It is the cheapest points on the entire test.