Should you guess on SQE questions?

Short answer: yes, always answer every SQE1 question, even when you have no idea. There is no negative marking, so a blank and a wrong answer cost you exactly the same amount: the mark for that question. A guess costs nothing extra and might get you a mark you would otherwise have thrown away.

That is the whole policy in two sentences. The more useful question is what to do when you genuinely do not know the answer and the clock is running down.

Why there is no reason to ever leave a blank

SQE1 is marked on a simple basis: correct answers score, everything else does not. A wrong answer and an empty answer are treated identically. There is no penalty subtracted for choosing badly.

That single fact changes the maths. If you leave a question blank, your chance of scoring on it is zero. If you guess, even with no knowledge of the topic at all, you have some chance of scoring, because SQE1 is single-best-answer format: one correct option among several plausible-looking ones. Each question gives you five options, so a completely random guess is roughly a one-in-five chance purely by luck. Not a great number on its own, but a lot better than zero.

There is no scenario under the current SQE1 marking rules where leaving a question blank beats guessing. Guessing dominates blanks in every case.

This is worth internalising early in your prep, not discovering in a panic on exam day. If pacing is tight and you are running out of time in a session, the right response is to guess and move on, not to freeze on a question you cannot finish properly.

The single-best-answer format, and why it matters for guessing

SQE1 questions are not simple recall or "select all that apply." Each question gives you a short scenario followed by five answer options, and you pick the single best answer among them. Wrong options are usually written to look plausible if you only have a surface understanding of the topic, so a pure random guess is a little weaker in practice than the one-in-five baseline suggests.

More usefully, this means partial knowledge is worth a lot. You rarely need to know the full answer to improve your odds. Ruling out even one clearly wrong option lifts your chance from one-in-five to one-in-four. Ruling out two gets you to one-in-three. Educated guessing on the SQE is really about elimination, not blind luck.

Educated guessing tactics that actually help

None of this is about gaming the exam. It is about using the minutes you have left efficiently when you cannot fully solve a question.

1. Eliminate before you guess. Read all the options first. Cross out anything clearly wrong, irrelevant to the scenario, or contradicting a rule you do remember. Even one elimination meaningfully improves your odds.
2. Watch for options that answer the wrong question. SQE1 scenarios often include a specific twist (a deadline, a party's role, a procedural step). An option can be legally accurate in general but wrong for that particular scenario.
3. Be wary of absolute language. Options using words like "always," "never," or "automatically" are worth a second look. They are not automatically wrong, but SQE1 scenarios frequently hinge on exceptions.
4. Notice when two options are near-identical. If two answers differ by only one word or condition, the correct answer is often one of that pair, since the exam is testing whether you catch the distinction.
5. Use consistency across the scenario. If an earlier part of the scenario implied a fact (a date, a status, a relationship between parties), check whether an option contradicts it.
6. Do not overthink a first instinct you are fairly confident in. Guessing tactics are for questions you are genuinely unsure about. Second-guessing an answer you actually knew, purely out of nerves, tends to lose more marks than it gains.

Pacing: guess and move, do not stall

SQE1 gives you roughly one minute forty seconds per question on average across the full 360-question exam. That is a tight budget once you account for reading a scenario and weighing the options, so time spent stuck on one question is time taken directly from later questions in the same session.

The practical rule: if you have spent noticeably longer than your average pace on a question and are still unsure, apply the elimination tactics above, pick your best option, and move on. Coming back at the end is fine, but only if you have actually finished the rest of the paper with time to spare.

This is also a good reason to rehearse pacing in full timed mocks before exam day, not just review content in isolation. If you consistently run out of time in mocks and end up guessing on the last block of questions under pressure, that is a pacing problem worth fixing in revision. Checking the SQE dates for 2026 and 2027 and what the SQE actually costs are useful starting points if you are still mapping out how much runway you have before your sitting.

What guessing strategy cannot fix

It is worth being honest about the limits here. Elimination tactics and a policy of always answering can nudge your score up at the margins. They will not turn a genuinely under-prepared candidate into a pass.

SQE1's pass rates move around by sitting, which is a reminder that exam-day tactics sit on top of solid preparation, not instead of it. Guessing strategy is a way to avoid losing marks you do not need to lose, not a substitute for covering the syllabus. For the fuller picture on how pass rates have moved and what drives the swings, see the pass rates breakdown.

The same logic applies to using mocks well. Tracking which topics you guess on, rather than just your overall score, tells you where the real gaps are. A free SQE study planner can help turn that kind of topic-by-topic tracking into an actual weekly revision schedule, rather than a vague sense of "I should probably do more contract law."

A simple guessing checklist for exam day

• Never leave a question blank: no negative marking means an unanswered question is a guaranteed zero.
• Read every option before eliminating. Do not guess off the first two.
• Cross out anything clearly wrong, contradicting the stated facts, or answering a different question than the one asked.
• Be cautious of absolute wording and near-identical answer pairs; both are common signals.
• Keep an eye on the clock. A guess after brief thought beats a blank caused by stalling.
• Flag genuinely uncertain answers for review only if time allows at the end, not as your default plan.

Frequently asked questions

Does SQE1 have negative marking? No. SQE1 has no negative marking. Wrong answers and blank answers are scored the same way, so there is no penalty for guessing.

Should I answer every question on the SQE even if I don't know it? Yes. Because there is no negative marking, guessing always gives you a better expected outcome than leaving a question blank. Even a random guess has a real chance of being correct, and elimination tactics improve that chance further.

What are the odds of guessing correctly on an SQE1 question? SQE1 uses single-best-answer questions with five options each, so a pure random guess is roughly a one-in-five chance. Eliminating even one clearly wrong option improves those odds noticeably.

Is it better to guess quickly or spend time eliminating options? A quick elimination pass, ruling out options that are clearly wrong or contradict the scenario's facts, is usually worth the extra seconds. Agonising over a single question for several minutes is not, given SQE1's tight per-question time budget.

Can guessing strategy help me pass SQE1? It can help you avoid losing marks unnecessarily, particularly where you have partial knowledge. It will not replace solid preparation across the full syllabus, so treat it as a way to protect marks you have earned, not a shortcut around revision.

Guessing on the SQE is not really a gamble once you understand the marking rules. It is closer to a default setting: always answer, use whatever partial knowledge you have to eliminate options, and keep moving so a handful of hard questions never costs you the rest of the paper.