Trust Yourself, and Your Prediction 

Don’t talk yourself out of the correct answer. If you’ve understood the passage and made a strong prediction, the correct answer will probably match it.  Here’s how to stop sabotaging yourself at the finish line.

Predictions Are Your Anchor, Not a Suggestion

Choosing the correct answer doesn’t come from sifting through answer choices. It comes from understanding the passage first and making a strong prediction.

A strong prediction is earned before you ever look at the answer choices. First, read the passage carefully and engage with it. If it’s an argument, ask whether it’s valid. Most times it won’t be. Figure out exactly why the premises fail to prove the conclusion. If the passage is a set of facts, determine what those facts actually establish. Then read the question and predict what a correct answer would have to do, even if you can’t predict the exact wording.

That prediction is your anchor. It tells you what the correct answer must do. The answer choices are not there to inspire new ideas or introduce “clever” twists. They’re there to confirm, or contradict, what you already know.

Where Good Predictions Go Wrong

Many students make solid predictions, then shoot themselves in the foot reading the answer choices. They find an answer choice that closely matches what they predicted. Then they keep reading and encounter a different answer choice that feels “more convincing.”

At that point, doubt creeps in. Why didn’t I think of this? Maybe I missed something.

Usually, you didn’t miss anything. That idea just wasn’t in the passage. The answer choice introduces a new concept, subtly changes an idea the passage already expressed, or mashes key terms together and spits them out as an incorrect answer choice. But instead of rejecting it, students start inventing reasons why it might work.

That’s how wrong answers replace correct ones.

Read All Five Answers, But Don’t Go Fishing

Trusting your prediction does not mean stopping early. You still need to read all five answer choices.

Sometimes the best match appears later. Other times, an early answer might sound right, but it subtly changes the meaning. Remember: one word can be enough to make an answer wrong, and it’s never enough to make an answer choice right. 

Reading all five answers protects you from picking a tempting early answer when a later choice matches your prediction more cleanly. But it does not mean you should search for something “better” than what you already predicted.

Stop Trying to Save Bad Answers

Once you’ve made a strong prediction, four out of five answer choices should look bad. That’s expected. 

The mistake is treating unfamiliar ideas as promising just because they’re new. Students see an answer they didn’t predict and assume that novelty equals accuracy. Then they start forcing square pegs into round holes.

You are not trying to turn wrong answers into right ones. You are checking whether any answer matches your prediction more precisely than the one you’ve already found.

“Close” Isn’t Good Enough

An answer that sounds close to your prediction isn’t necessarily correct. Small wording differences can completely change meaning. Sometimes those differences matter. Sometimes they don’t. The only way to know is to ask a simple question: Is this difference meaningful given the question being asked?

If the difference still does the job the question demands, it’s fine. If it adds something new, shifts the claim, or asks you to assume more than the passage allows, it’s wrong.

What if Your Prediction is Wrong? 

Sometimes your prediction doesn’t match the correct answer. When this happens, it usually means something went wrong earlier. 

Most bad predictions come from incomplete understanding. Maybe the argument was more complex than it first appeared. Maybe you rushed. Maybe your prediction didn’t leave room for a reasonable variation. Or maybe you never fully identified what the passage was doing in the first place.

When that happens, don’t abandon the process. Go back and figure out why your prediction missed the mark. Did you misunderstand the argument? Miss an assumption? Overfocus on speed instead of understanding? The fix isn’t to stop predicting. It’s to predict more carefully and more flexibly next time.