To skip or not to skip? That is the question.

This year, there is no need to worry about having points deducted for incorrect answers on AP multiple choice questions. The College Board believes that making educated guesses on all questions will raise scores and breach the scoring gap that was previously seen between genders.

“The AP conference people found that this penalty was harming the grades of female students, as they  would elect not to answer certain questions to avoid this penalty,” said AP US/VA Government and AP World History teacher Jason Croston. “Male students were more likely to just guess even if they had no clue what the answer was.”

Now that this penalty is gone, students will guess freely on multiple choice questions, whereas in previous years, they may not have guessed for fear of the penalty affecting their final score. Students have responded very positively to this recent change, and are less worried about questions they should skip.

“I like it a lot,” said senior Josh McNamara. “Now I don’t have to stress as much about skipping questions and I think it will really help my grade.”

With this new ruling, the teachers also will be encouraging kids to answer every question on practice tests that they take in class to prepare. This is not much of a change for most students, because now every test except the SAT promotes answering every question.

“I have always made student answer every question in on quizzes and tests, so there will be no change in my class,” said Croston.

Students have been trained from a young age to eliminate the obviously wrong answers and just try to choose wisely if they don’t know the answer. Now, instead of just blindly skipping questions that students think they don’t know the answer to, the College Board hopes that students will look further into questions in case they actually do know the correct response.

“Now it is to everyone’s benefit to answer every question,” said AP Literature teacher Dr. Jennifer Beach. “Because even if you are making an educated guess you still have a 20 percent chance of getting it correct.”