Is there a penalty for guessing on the Digital SAT?
No. There has been no deduction for wrong answers on the SAT since 2016, and the Digital SAT kept it that way. Your raw score is a count of correct answers, so a blank and a wrong answer are worth exactly the same: nothing. Never leave a question unanswered.
This is one of the few SAT questions with a genuinely simple answer, and it is worth stating plainly because the myth persists: older versions of the test deducted a quarter of a point for a wrong answer, that stopped in 2016, and plenty of advice written before then is still circulating.
Your raw score is the number of questions you answered correctly. Nothing is subtracted.
What follows immediatelyLink to the section: What follows immediately
Never leave anything blank. A blank scores zero and a wrong answer scores zero, so a guess is free. On a four-option question a blind guess is worth roughly a quarter of a point in expectation — small, but strictly better than the alternative, and across a module it adds up.
With one option eliminated it is a third of a point. With two eliminated it is half. Elimination is worth doing even when you cannot get to the answer.
What this changes about pacingLink to the section: What this changes about pacing
The absence of a penalty makes a specific clock strategy correct, and it is not the one most people use.
With about a minute per question in Reading and Writing and about ninety seconds in Math, the failure mode is spending four minutes on a hard question and then leaving three easy ones at the end untouched. Every question is worth the same one point. A hard question is not worth more.
So: move. If a question is not yielding in the time it deserves, mark an answer — any answer — flag it, and go. You have banked a free lottery ticket and kept the time for questions you can actually get.
With two minutes left in a module, answer every remaining blank regardless of whether you have read it. This costs you nothing and occasionally gains a point.
What it does not changeLink to the section: What it does not change
Guessing does not affect routing in a way you can exploit. The routing decision after module 1 is a measurement of how you performed, and randomly guessing more does not produce a better path — it produces a noisier estimate of a lower one. There is no version of this where deliberately answering worse helps you, because the easier second module has a lower score ceiling.
It also does not mean accuracy is unimportant. Guessing is a strategy for questions you were going to lose anyway. It is not a substitute for knowing the material, and a module answered mostly by guessing produces a raw count near what chance alone would give you.
The one thing worth trackingLink to the section: The one thing worth tracking
Guessed-correct answers are invisible in your score and dangerous in your planning.
When you review a mock, separate the questions you got right into the ones where you knew why and the ones where you guessed. The second pile is not a success — it is a question you will get wrong on a different day, sitting inside a score that says you can do it.
This is the specific reason our review shows a rationale for every answer choice rather than just the correct one. If you picked the right answer for the wrong reason, the explanation of why the option you nearly chose is wrong is where the actual gap shows up.
Find out where you actually stand
Two full-length adaptive mocks, free, with every explanation — and a score band that tells you how confident it is.
Related
How is a raw SAT score converted into a scaled score?
What a raw score is, why the conversion to 200–800 is a lookup table rather than a formula, why the curve is not a straight line, and why no third party has the real one.
How does adaptive module routing work on the Digital SAT?
The Digital SAT routes you to an easier or harder second module based on your first. What that means for your score, why the two paths are not equivalent, and what it changes about how you practise.
How should you read your practice test results?
Your scaled score is the least useful number on the results page. What to read first, what a domain breakdown tells you that a total cannot, and why you should review the questions you got right.
The full method behind all of this: how your score is calculated.
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