You Are NOT Allowed to Say "I Have No Idea"

By EMPOWERea on December 14, 2021

You finish a practice set at 10:40 at night after a full day of work. You see a red X on question 9. You glance at the explanation, mutter "huh, no idea how I missed that," and click Next. I watch busy professionals do this every single week. It feels efficient. It is a TERRIBLE habit, and it is quietly costing you points.

Here is the rule: you are NOT allowed to say "I have no idea." You run teams. You make calls with incomplete data all day long. When a project slips, you don't tell your boss "no idea why." You find the cause. The Executive Assessment deserves the same treatment, because every missed question has a cause. Every one.

The lamp that won't turn on

Picture this. You walk into a room, flip the switch, and the lamp stays dark. Stop reading and think about it. Why might that happen? Don't read another word until you have at least three possible reasons.

Got them? Maybe the bulb is dead. Maybe the lamp isn't plugged in. Maybe the switch is broken. Maybe the power is out in the whole building. Notice something: you didn't need to be an electrician to come up with that list. You just had to refuse to shrug.

A dark table lamp in a room, with its loose plug on the floor, a burned out bulb beside it, and a flipped wall switch, each shown as a separate small scene around the lamp. — A dark lamp always has a reason. So does a wrong answer.

A wrong answer works exactly the same way. It is a lamp that didn't turn on. Your job is to check the bulb, the plug and the switch before you move on.

Why this matters MORE on the EA

The Executive Assessment, made by GMAC, is short. It is 90 minutes split into three 30 minute sections: Integrated Reasoning (12 questions that ask you to read tables, charts and short texts together), Verbal Reasoning (14 questions: Sentence Correction, Critical Reasoning and Reading Comprehension) and Quantitative Reasoning (14 questions: Problem Solving and Data Sufficiency). Each section is scored 0 to 20, and the total runs from 100 to 200, with all three sections weighted the same.

Do the math on that. Forty questions total. There is no hiding a sloppy habit inside a long exam. The test is also adaptive section by section, which means how you do on the first part of a section shapes what you see next. A silly miss early on isn't just one lost point. It can change the path of the whole section.

So I'll make you a bet. Go look at your last practice set. I'll bet MOST of your misses were not on the hardest questions. They were on questions you could have gotten right, lost to something small and fixable.

The five usual suspects

Almost every wrong answer comes from one of these. Learn the list, and "no idea" stops being an option.

Cause	What it looks like	The fix
Didn't know the rule	You had no clue how to start	Learn that one rule, then redo three questions that use it
Answered the wrong question	Your math was right, but you solved for the wrong thing	Write down what the question asks BEFORE you start
Worked in your head	A small arithmetic slip or a dropped detail	Put every step on paper, every time
Took the long route	You got there, but it ate four minutes	Learn a faster path, like testing the answers
Changed a right answer	You had it, then talked yourself out of it	Only switch when you can name the exact error

Notice what is NOT on the list: "I'm bad at math" and "I'm just not a test person." Those aren't causes. They are shrugs wearing a costume. And if math feels like the problem, that's useful information, not a verdict. I've written about why being rusty at math is actually good news, because it tells you exactly what to train.

Let's diagnose one together

Try this before you open the answer. Take notes. Time yourself.

Try it

A store cuts the price of a jacket by 20 percent. A month later, the store raises the sale price by 20 percent, and the jacket now costs $96. What was the jacket's original price?

$80
$96
$100
$104
$120

Show the answer

Step 1: Write down what the question asks. On your paper: "ORIGINAL price = ?" This one line protects you from a trap we'll get to in a second.

Step 2: Test the answers. You have five numbers. One of them works. Instead of building an equation, start with (C), a nice round number.

Start at $100. Cut it by 20 percent: 20 percent of 100 is 20, so the sale price is 100 minus 20 = $80. Now raise $80 by 20 percent: 20 percent of 80 is 16, so the new price is 80 plus 16 = $96. That matches. The answer is (C).

Step 3: Check it a second way. Work backward. The final $96 is 120 percent of the sale price, so the sale price is 96 divided by 1.2 = $80. That $80 is 80 percent of the original, so the original is 80 divided by 0.8 = $100. Same answer. Good.

The traps. Two wrong answers are sitting there waiting for you. If you assumed "down 20, up 20, back where I started," you picked (B) $96. That's the head math trap: it FEELS right, but 20 percent of a smaller number is a smaller number, so the price doesn't come all the way back. If you correctly found $80 and stopped, you picked (A). That's the wrong question trap: you solved for the sale price, not the original.

Now the diagnosis. Say you picked (A). "No idea" is not allowed. The real cause is "I answered the wrong question." The fix is the one line from Step 1. Say you picked (B). The cause is "I did percent math in my head and trusted a feeling." The fix is putting every step on paper.

See how different those two fixes are? Same question, same red X, two totally different causes. If you just read the explanation and clicked Next, you'd never know which one you have. And you'd make the same mistake again next week.

The mistakes I see in review, and what to do INSTEAD

Reading the explanation first. Once you see the solution, everything looks obvious, and your brain tells you "oh, I knew that." You didn't, or you would have gotten it right.
INSTEAD: Redo the question cold, on paper, before you read a word of the explanation. Wherever you get stuck or slip, THAT is your cause.
Writing "careless" as the cause. "Careless" is just "no idea" in a nicer suit. It names nothing you can fix.
INSTEAD: Name the exact moment. "I wrote 18 instead of 16." "I missed the word NOT in the question." Specific causes have specific fixes.
Only reviewing the wrong ones. A lucky guess that landed is a wrong answer you haven't been caught on yet.
INSTEAD: Mark every question you weren't sure about while you work. Review those with the same care as your misses.
Blaming the clock. "I ran out of time" is never the real cause. Pacing trouble is a symptom. It comes from re-reading because you didn't take notes, doing work in your head, or taking the long route.
INSTEAD: For every question that took too long, find WHERE the time went. Then fix that step.
Finding the cause and moving on anyway. A diagnosis with no follow up is just a nicer way of shrugging.
INSTEAD: Write the cause and the fix in one sentence in an error log. Then redo that question in a few days and see if the fix stuck.

A person at a desk at night, pencil in hand, redoing a problem on a notepad, with a closed laptop pushed aside. — Review happens on paper, not by clicking Next.

This is a skill you already have

You don't need to be a genius to do any of this. You need to be honest and a little stubborn. The EA is a standardized test. It asks the same kinds of questions in the same kinds of ways, so the same causes show up again and again. That is GOOD news. It means every cause you find is one you can train away, and the score you get is the score you EARN.

And here's the bonus: this is exactly the thinking your Executive MBA will ask of you. Look at the data. Name the likely causes. Test a fix. You're not just studying for a test. You're practicing the job.

Your challenge for tonight

Pull up your last 10 wrong answers. Not 50. Ten. For each one, redo it cold on paper, then write one sentence naming the cause, using the five suspects above. "No idea" is banned. "Careless" is banned. If you can't find the cause, keep looking until you can.

Then look at your 10 sentences. I'll bet two or three causes show up over and over. Those are your next two weeks of training. Go find them.

Sources

GMAC: Executive Assessment structure, sections and scoring