A machine, not a person, will score your SAT II Physics Test. The tabulating machine sees only the filled-in ovals on your answer sheet, and doesn’t care how you came to these answers; it just impassively notes if your answers are correct. A lucky guess counts in your favor just as much as an answer you give confidently. By the same token, if you accidentally fill in B where you meant C, you won’t get any credit for having known what the answer was. Think of the multiple-choice test as a message to you from ETS: “We care only about your answers. We do not care about the work behind those answers.”

So you should give ETS as many right answers as possible. The SAT II Physics Test not only allows you to show off your knowledge of physics, it allows you to show off your foxlike cunning by figuring out what strategies will enable you to best display that knowledge. This chapter will first cover some general principles of test taking that apply equally to this test and any other SAT test you might take, then it will discuss a few strategies that are particularly useful to SAT II Physics.