Because the HAT does not penalise wrong answers, your raw score is exactly attempts multiplied by accuracy. That single fact turns guessing from a gamble into a technique, and it means a candidate who leaves fifteen questions blank has donated marks before the results are even marked.
The athletes of this test are not the ones who answer everything correctly. They are the ones who (a) never leave a blank, (b) spend their minutes on questions they can actually win, and (c) know three or four elimination tricks that shrink four options to two in ten seconds.
Model every question as a bet whose expected value depends only on how many options remain alive.
| Situation | Expected marks | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| Blank | 0 | Never correct |
| Blind guess, 4 options | 0.25 | Always better than blank |
| One option eliminated | 0.33 | Better again |
| Two options eliminated | 0.50 | A coin flip you should always take |
| Three options eliminated | 1.00 | That is just answering the question |
The table has one practical consequence: guessing is a fallback, elimination is the technique. Ten seconds spent deleting one clearly impossible option raises the value of the guess by a third. Fifteen blanks guessed blind earn about four marks; the same fifteen blanks with one option eliminated earn about five.
The model is incomplete about accuracy, because accuracy is not fixed: it depends on how much time each attempted question gets. The rest of this lesson is about spending attention where it converts.
On your first pass, sort questions by what they cost, not by how they look:
Two rules make the buckets work. First, your provisional guess for a red question is written immediately — never leave a page with blanks on it, because the final minutes are exactly when things go wrong. Second, a question never moves from green to red once started: the decision is made on sight, in the 40-second look.
| Trick | Where it works | Example |
|---|---|---|
| Last-digit check | Any multiplication or power | 148 × 27 must end in 6, which kills options ending 4 or 8 |
| Magnitude estimate | Arithmetic, percentages, rates | A shirt at 1,480 with 27% off is about 1,080; an option of 10,800 is off by a factor of ten and dies on sight |
| Backsolve | Algebra, ages, percentages | Put each option into the original statement; the true one satisfies it exactly |
| Plug in a number | Variable expressions, ratios | Set x = 100 or x = 10 and test the options numerically |
| Direction check | Percentage change, averages | A price cut then rise cannot return to the original price, so "unchanged" is dead |
| Parity and divisibility | Counting, number properties | An odd count cannot be produced by an even-only sum |
Question: A shirt marked at Rs 1,480 is sold at 27% off. What is the sale price? Options: Rs 1,081 / Rs 1,096 / Rs 399 / Rs 1,844.
Twenty seconds, no long multiplication, exactly one option standing. Note what the work looked like: three cheap checks instead of one expensive calculation. That is the pattern to rehearse until it is automatic.
You have 40 seconds left and one unanswered question. You can clearly eliminate two of the four options. What is the best action?
A distance question asks how far a car travels at 60 km/h for 150 minutes. One option is 150 km and another is 15 km. What does the magnitude check tell you?
In a reading comprehension question, which inference option is most likely to be wrong?
You have answered a quantitative question and moved on. On review you notice the question said "in metres" and you used centimetres. What should you do?
Without looking back: what is a blind guess worth out of one mark, and what is it worth after eliminating one option?
The answer: 0.25 marks blind, 0.33 after eliminating one option — and both beat a blank, which is worth nothing.
A blind guess among four options is worth marks in expectation. Because HAT has negative marking, a blank is worth , so the final minutes of the paper are spent on every remaining item.
Sort these six situations into green, yellow and red, and say what the first action is for each: (1) a vocabulary item whose word you know, (2) a five-question seating puzzle, (3) a percentage word problem about profit, (4) a reading passage with four questions, (5) a three-equation system that is not in the question bank you know, (6) a number series with no visible pattern after ten seconds.
Green: the vocabulary item (10 seconds), the profit problem (familiar template, one line of setup). Answer both immediately and bank the marks.
Yellow: the seating puzzle and the reading passage. Both are sets and both reward structure rather than speed: draw the grid for the puzzle, map the passage for the reading set. Mark them and take them in the second pass, with a hard cap of six to eight minutes each.
Red: the three-equation system you have not seen, and the series with no visible pattern. Guess provisionally, mark them, and return only if time remains. Neither deserves more than 90 seconds total on the first pass, because both can eat a quarter of an hour without producing a mark.
The point of the exercise is that the sorting took ten seconds and the decisions were made before the pressure arrived. That is what a trained candidate does differently.
You now know the arena, the budget and the betting arithmetic. From here the course stops being about the test and starts being about the subjects — beginning with Quantitative Reasoning, the 40-mark section, where you will find the fastest marks on the paper and the ones that must be protected.