Every AMC 8 has questions you can't do. That's normal — even very good scores leave some blank-looking. The question is what to put down, and there's a right answer to that. We counted every answer from 41 real papers (1985–2026) to find out.
On the AMC 8 a wrong answer costs you nothing. There's no penalty, and a blank earns no credit either. So a blank is a guaranteed zero, and a guess is a free 20% shot.
If you leave 5 blanks, you throw away about 1 mark on average. Mark something on every single question — even if you're choosing with your eyes shut.
This one rule is worth more than everything else on this page put together, and unlike the rest it isn't a statistic — it's just how the scoring works.
Before you guess, spend ten seconds killing options. You almost always know more than you think:
Killing one option takes your guess from 20% to 25%. Killing two takes it to 33%.
That is a far bigger jump than anything in Rule 3. Eliminating is real maths; the letter trick below is a last resort.
We counted all 1025 answers from 41 papers. Here's how often each letter was right:
| Letter | How often it was the answer | Share |
|---|---|---|
| (A) | 14.6% | |
| (B) | 23.1% | |
| (C) | 24.2% | |
| (D) | 23.7% | |
| (E) | 14.3% |
If every letter were equally likely, each row would read 20%.
Look at the shape rather than the winner. (A) and (E) are the rare ones. The three middle letters together are the answer 71.0% of the time, where pure chance would give 60%. On the last five questions alone it's 68.3%.
Stuck with nothing to go on? Mark (B), (C) or (D). Avoid (A) and (E).
Why this happens — and it's not magic. AMC answer choices are usually listed in order, smallest to largest. The wrong options are built by overshooting and undershooting the real answer, which parks the true answer in the middle of the list more often than at either end.
Honestly? Not much. Here's the real size of it, so you don't over-trust it:
| What you do on 5 unknown questions | Marks you'd expect |
|---|---|
| Leave them blank | 0 |
| Guess any letter at random | 1.0 |
| Always guess a middle letter | ~1.2 |
| Eliminate one option first, then guess | ~1.3 |
So the letter trick buys you about a fifth of a mark. Not nothing — but notice that filling in blanks at all is worth a whole mark, and eliminating beats the letter trick. Spend your energy there.
Being straight with you about the numbers. We also tested whether “always pick the most common letter” actually works, by choosing the letter using only the older papers and then checking it against each newer paper — the way you'd have to use it in real life, without knowing the future.
On the last five questions it scored 22% instead of 20%, which is well inside the range you'd get from luck alone. Over a whole paper it did hold up a little. The “avoid (A) and (E)” pattern, though, shows up in every era we looked at — the 1980s and 90s papers, the modern ones, and the last ten years on their own.
So: trust “lean middle” a little. Don't trust “C is lucky” at all.
Counted from 1025 answers across 41 papers, 1985–2026. Figures update by themselves as new papers are added. · Try it on a mock test → · The seven test-day habits → · Back to lessons