Multiple-Choice Under Time Pressure

Forty minutes and about thirty-two questions gives you roughly seventy-five seconds each. That is enough time to read carefully and do two or three steps of work, and it is not enough time to flounder. Every question is worth the same, so four minutes spent on a hard one costs you three easy ones further down the paper. The fix is a hard rule rather than a judgement call: if you have no route into a question after about twenty seconds, mark an answer, note the number, and move on. And ACER says outright that the tests are difficult, so not finishing everything is normal, not a disaster.

Nothing is deducted for a wrong answer, so a blank is strictly worse than a guess. A blank scores zero every time; a guess scores zero or one and never less. With four options a blind guess comes in about one time in four, which over several questions is real marks. So leave yourself about two minutes at the end and fill every empty oval, whatever you know about them. One genuine danger comes with skipping: if you leave a question out, the next answer can land in the wrong oval and shift everything after it. Check the question number against the oval number every few questions.

Eliminating is usually faster than solving. Rule out the options that cannot possibly be right, and a blind guess at one in four becomes a coin flip at one in two. In this example you need five gigabytes of room, so two and four gigabytes fail immediately — they are simply too small. Six and eight both pass, and six is the smaller, so six is the answer. Even if you had run out of time after ruling out the first two, you would be guessing between two rather than four. Crossing out is not a last resort; it is often the quickest route to the answer.

In a four-option paper the answer is already printed on the page, so testing the options is often easier than solving for the unknown. A number is doubled and then five is added, giving twenty-nine. Rather than undoing the steps, try the options: twelve doubled is twenty-four, add five and you get twenty-nine, so twelve is the answer. There is a shortcut within the shortcut too — start with one of the middle values, because if it overshoots you know the answer is one of the smaller ones and you have eliminated several at once.

You get no calculator, no ruler and no paper beyond the booklet, and that is a promise as much as a restriction: the arithmetic is meant to be manageable. Three habits do most of the work. Round first and decide second — nineteen times twenty-one is about four hundred, so an option of twelve hundred goes without any calculation. Check the size of your answer, because if a share of something comes out bigger than the whole you have divided the wrong way round. And use the last digit: twenty-three times seventeen must end in one, since three sevens are twenty-one, and that alone can kill three options. If a question seems to demand heavy computation, you have misread it or missed a shortcut. Quiz and exercises now.