How to Prioritize Questions on the MAT
There are 120 analogies on the Miller Analogies Test (MAT), and you only have an hour to answer them all. Therefore, you should prioritize your time and answer the easiest MAT analogies first if you want to get the best score.
You see, questions on the MAT range from easy to hard, and luckily, keeping track of the difficulty level is pretty straightforward: Questions get harder as the test goes on. So remember to consider where in the test the question appears when assessing its difficulty level and deciding to spend extra time answering it.
Your first instincts when choosing an answer to an MAT analogy are more likely to be correct on easier questions and less likely to be correct on harder ones because hard questions have unpopular answers — that’s one of the reasons they’re hard. In other words, the right answer often doesn’t look right at first glance.
The test writers who create the MAT don’t just sit around and decide which questions they think are difficult — they actually test them on test takers. That’s why 20 of the questions on the MAT don’t count toward your score — the test writers use them to see how many students get the question right.
If few people get a question right, that question will appear toward the end of a future MAT test. So the questions toward the end of the MAT you take are the ones most previous students got wrong — they’re questions with unpopular answers.
Also remember not to spend precious time overanalyzing questions that appear early in the MAT — most people got those questions right!