Comment by tboyd47

I tutor my little brother-in-law sometimes (he's 9), and I like to deprogram him from public school testing culture as much as possible. I tell him that when he's with me and he doesn't know the answer, don't guess. Just say, "I don't know." And I test him, too. I ask him questions he can't possibly know the answer to, or questions that have no right answer, just to hear him say, "I don't know." And then I congratulate him for being honest. I do this because I know that public school encourages him to do the exact opposite. At least when I was in school, they never want you to leave a question blank. They always tell you to guess. If you guess, and get the answer wrong, you get partial credit (IIRC, 25%), but if you leave it blank, you get no credit. Why they do this, I have no idea. Maybe they feel like if the child guesses, they have a 25% chance of getting the right answer, so that means the school has a 25% chance of getting the federal money, so therefore the child should get 25% credit for at least filling in the bubble. Makes sense in kind of a bizarre way. But in the real world, there is no 25% credit for guessing.