Four Answer Choices Instead of Five

The math section only hands you four choices per question. That one missing choice matters more than it looks. With five options a blind guess succeeds 1 in 5 times, a 20% shot. Drop to four options and that same blind guess succeeds 1 in 4 times, a 25% shot. Nothing about your knowledge changed. The arithmetic of guessing just got better, purely because the section handed you fewer options to sort through.

This connects directly to pacing. You have roughly sixty-seven seconds per item, and some questions will eat far more than that. When time runs out, the choice is never guess-versus-think-harder, it's guess-versus-blank. Since the section does not subtract points for wrong answers, a blank is strictly worse than a guess: a blank guarantees zero, a guess guarantees a 25% chance of full credit. Fill in every bubble before time is called, even on items you never read.

Elimination sharpens this further. If you can rule out even one of the four choices before guessing, you're no longer guessing among four, you're guessing among three, and your odds jump from 25% to 1 in 3, about 33%. That's often faster than solving the problem outright, and it's the real payoff of the four-choice format: a little bit of elimination work buys a noticeably better shot than pure chance.