Playing the odds.

Now, here is the real truth

about this whole test-taking thing.

Random guessing is going to lead to failure, guaranteed.

Have you ever sat down at an exam and you decided,

hey, I didn't study enough,

so since it's just multiple choice, I'm going to guess.

I'm just going to put all A's down, or all B's down,

or all C's down, or all D's down.

And then hopefully, I'll get enough to pass.

Or maybe you decide I'm going to mix it up,

and I'm going to Christmas tree this.

And I'm going to put A, B, C, D, C, B, A,

and keep doing little patterns like that.

Well, if you do that, you're going to fail.

You have a chance of getting some of the questions right

but if there's 100 questions on the exam,

and you guess all A's, all B's, all C's, or all D's,

the chances are,

you're going to get around 25% of the questions right.

And that's going to fail.

You may get luckier and you may not,

but if you're playing the odds this way,

you're not going to do very well.

Instead, I want to show you something a little bit different.

And I want us to play the odds

and increase the odds of winning.

So how are we going to beat the odds?

Let's say we start with 100 questions on the exam

and each one has four choices.

Now, that gives us 400 possible options,

100% of the available choices out there.

Now, if I can throw out some of these answers,

then I can say, well, this one is definitely not right,

and this one is definitely not right,

then instead of reading from A, B, C, and D,

I'm now only looking at maybe A and C,

because I know that B and D were not right.

Now I've got a 50% chance of getting the answer correct.

In this case, I only have 200 available choices

now in the exam

and I can get 50% on the exam.

If I can do that for every question,

the chances are, I'm going to end up passing the exam

because with a 50-50 shot,

you're going to get at least 50% right.

And if I can make some better guesses along the way too,

well, there you go.

So how do you beat those odds?

Well, if we're at 50% already on the exam,

we just need to get to 70 or 75% to pass.

And it's just a small leap to get there.

We're not talking about making huge progress,

we just need to get a couple more questions right

and then we'll be able to pass.

It doesn't really matter if we get a 75%,

or a 80%, or a 90%, or even 100%.

Because no one's going to know.

They're just going to know you passed or you didn't.

So when you're playing the odds,

I want you to look at the question

and throw out the ones that you think aren't right.

First, we're going to throw out the ones we know aren't right

'cause there's going to be some of those.

But then you're going to get down

to where you think something isn't right.

And I want you to throw those out too.

Because if you can narrow down your choices

and take your best guess,

you have a higher chance of passing.

Because here's the dirty little secret,

on these exams, you will not get penalized for guessing.

If you leave the question blank,

you get a zero for that question.

If you answer it wrong, you get a zero for that question.

And so if you can guess

and throw out even one of those options,

well, you've increased your chances

from 25% of getting the question right

to 33% of getting it right.

If you could throw out two of those options,

you now are up to a 50% chance of getting it right.

You're getting the idea here, right?

We're trying to increase our odds of guessing it right.

And so guess if you need to,

and that'll help you get through the exam.