There is no negative marking on the dMAT, on any subtest. A wrong answer and a blank score identically: zero. The official guidance is explicit — if you do not know, guess. Yet candidates still submit papers with empty questions, which is the one genuinely unforced error available in this exam.
What almost no preparation material explains is that the odds are different in each of the three subtests, because the answer formats are different. Guessing well means knowing which one you are in.
Marks are awarded for correct answers. Nothing is deducted for incorrect ones. Therefore the expected value of a guess is always positive, and the expected value of a blank is always exactly zero. There is no situation in the dMAT where leaving a question empty is correct.
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Figure Sequences is single-choice with four options, and each option is a complete pair — matrices 5 and 6 together, not one at a time. A blind guess is a one-in-four chance.
You can usually do better than blind. Because the options are pairs, a single insight often eliminates two of them at once: if you are confident the circle must move right rather than bounce, every option showing it bouncing goes. Even partial understanding of one figure out of three or four is often enough to halve the field.
Practical order: identify the easiest figure in the item — usually the one moving in a straight line without rotation — work out where it must be, and eliminate on that alone.
Latin Squares presents a fixed answer column of A to E, in order, five choices rather than four. A blind guess is one in five, slightly worse than Figure Sequences.
But it is also the subtest where elimination is cheapest. A single scan of the marked row and the marked column takes fifteen seconds and typically eliminates three of the five letters outright. That converts a one-in-five guess into a coin flip for a fraction of your time budget. Always run the scan before guessing, even when you know you will not finish the deduction chain.
This is where generic guessing advice breaks down. Mathematical Equations is not multiple choice. There are no options. You type a number for every variable on an on-screen keypad, and marking is all-or-nothing across the set.
So "guessing" means something different: entering plausible values rather than picking from a list. Two things help:
The most common failure is planning to return to a hard question and running out of time. Enter a guess the moment you decide an item is not resolving — then come back if time allows. That way the clock expiring costs you nothing.
Sit a full mock and check your blanks afterwards. If there are any, that is free marks you handed back, and it is the easiest thing in your whole preparation to fix.
Everything above is a method, and a method you have only read is worth very little at 75 seconds a question. The only way it becomes usable is repetition under a clock, on a screen, with nothing to write on.
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No. There is no negative marking on any dMAT subtest. A wrong answer scores the same as a blank, which is zero, so guessing is always better than leaving a question empty. Official guidance is to guess if you do not know.
It depends on the subtest. Figure Sequences is single-choice with four options, each showing a complete pair of matrices 5 and 6. Latin Squares uses a fixed answer column of A to E, so five options. Mathematical Equations offers no options at all - you type a value for each variable.
Yes, in the sense that you should never leave fields empty. There are no options to pick from, so enter values within the permitted 1 to 20 range for every variable, including any you could not derive.
As soon as you judge that a question is not going to resolve, rather than planning to return to it later. Entering a guess immediately means that running out of time costs you nothing.
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