SoullessAutomaton comments on Shut Up And Guess - Less Wrong
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They were in SAT prep books 25-27 years ago. (I took the SAT's while I was still 15.) The explanation given was something along the lines of, "Most people say that the SAT penalizes you for guessing, but this is wrong. Rather, it simply makes sure that, on average, guessing won't get you any extra points if you don't know anything about the question. If you can eliminate even one wrong answer out of five, you will always come out ahead by guessing. If you can't, then you still won't lose anything by guessing." They then showed math and examples to back it up.
It was actually in a very early part of the book I read, because they wanted you to understand how important it was to be able to identify even one wrong answer, and thus why the methods you were going to learn for doing that were important.
This exactly matches my experience with test prep books from a decade later.
Honestly, it's the first and foundational principle of learning to take multiple-choice tests--figure out what the guessing penalty is. And, in my experience, few such tests are calibrated to make guessing net negative.
Quick pruning of the set of possible answers and guessing if you can't decide on the rest is just what you do.