Keep Your Paradigm Straight, Part II

You’re not owed a “good” answer

The test maker only owes you one thing: on each question, there needs to be one answer choice that is not wrong. Notice I did not say one answer choice that is best, right, righteous, awesome, or anything positive. We used a negative base ethic. You need to adopt this ethic—or, perhaps better put, this form of conduct.

Unlike the former you mentioned in Part I, you need to go into each new problem with a healthy dose of suspicious-mindedness, yet also an equally healthy dose of trust in the enemy’s format to be reliable and conquerable.

You need to trust that the test maker uses explicit rules and concepts to craft their questions; they do not provide you multiple acceptable answers, one of which is the “best” (or “juiciest,” or “optimum,” or “most goody goody”).

At the risk of sounding redundant, stop chasing a best answer; it does not exist.

No really, I’ll prove it

In the ACT English section, for example, there are 75 questions with four answers each. Out of those 300 total answer choices, 225 are wrong. I do not mean “not the best;” they are wrong. Concretely, transparently, superficially, rule-basedly wrong. They are, in fact, handcrafted by the enemy, whose only goal in life is to screw with your confidence on test day, making you feel like you’re juggling answer choices. Therein lies the “wild goose chase” mentioned in Part I.

On the entire ACT, there are 705 incorrect answers… and only 215 correct answers. That means a mere 23.67% of the answers are correct. The rest of the test is 76.63% contrived nonsense, waiting to bring about your demise.

Those numbers roughly make for a 30% odds* of getting a right answer by just guessing. In case, like me, you’re not a gambler, let me be abundantly clear: those odds are not in your favor. Don’t guess on any question—except as a prepared component of a strategy to deal with failed time management (i.e., running out of time). More on that in later blog posts.

_{^{*Note: the odds of an outcome is defined as the ratio of the probability of the event happening to the probability of the event not happening. (Thanks to ACT, Inc. for that definition.)}}

By this point, I hope you realize that the test format—though reliable—is not your friend. It is your enemy. Keep this in mind not only when you sit for an officially administered test but also when you prepare.

Keep your paradigm straight.

Good luck on your test.