Flag it, guess it, move on: the exam-clock decisions that protect your score.
There is no penalty for guessing on the NCE. What to do with an item you cannot answer in ninety seconds, and how to use the review screen.
By Dr. Andrew Wichterman · September 19, 2026 · 5 min read · Updated October 23, 2026
Two hundred items in 225 minutes gives you about 67 seconds each. Most items take less. A few will take far more if you let them, and those few are where scores are lost. You need a rule for them before you sit down.
There is no penalty for guessing
The NCE scores the number correct. A blank and a wrong answer are worth the same. So every item gets an answer, always, even if it is a guess. Never leave the review screen with unanswered items.
The ninety-second rule
If you have read the item and the options and do not have an answer after about ninety seconds, pick the best remaining option, flag the item, and move on. Do not agonize. Your first elimination is usually sound; what you would gain by staying is small and what you lose in later items is not.
How to guess well
A guess between four options is twenty-five percent. A guess between two is fifty, and most items can be cut to two in thirty seconds with three rules. First, eliminate the extreme: immediate termination, immediate reporting, immediate hospitalization and "do nothing" are the wrong answers more often than not, because the exam prefers the measured, least-restrictive step. Second, eliminate the option that answers a different question: a true statement about the topic that does not match the qualifier in the stem. Third, eliminate the option that has the counselor acting alone when consultation or the client's involvement is available.
Between the two that remain, prefer the one that keeps the client in the room and the counselor within the Code: assess before acting, collaborate before deciding, document throughout. Prefer the textbook answer over the clinically creative one. And prefer the option that uses the exam's own vocabulary precisely over the one that paraphrases it. None of these is certain. All of them move a guess from a quarter toward a half, and across the ten or fifteen items you will genuinely guess on, that difference is several scaled points.
The calculation items
A handful of items ask you to convert a z-score to a T-score or a percentile, place an IQ relative to the mean, or read a standard deviation off a normal curve. They take longer than sixty-seven seconds if you work them from scratch, and they are worth exactly one point each, the same as the item asking who wrote the Code. Decide in advance how you will handle them: know the five anchors cold, z of zero at the fiftieth percentile, plus and minus one at roughly the eighty-fourth and sixteenth, plus and minus two at about the ninety-eighth and second, and the conversions, T equals fifty plus ten z, IQ equals one hundred plus fifteen z.
If the item fits those anchors, it takes thirty seconds. If it requires more, do the elimination you can, flag it, and move; it is a good flag because a minute at the end may actually finish it. What you should not do is spend four minutes on it in the middle of the exam while your attention is at its best, because those four minutes would have answered three items you know.
What flagging is for
Flags are for items where more time might actually help: a calculation, a stem you want to reread slowly, a theorist you might recall later. Flags are not for items you simply do not know. If you do not know it, you will not know it at minute 220 either.
Using the review screen
With your pacing checkpoints, you should reach the end with fifteen to twenty minutes left. Go to the review screen, confirm nothing is blank, then work the flagged items in order. Change an answer only if you can name the reason; "it feels wrong now" is not a reason. If you test online, you cannot return to the first 100 items after the break, so settle those flags before you take it.
The last ten minutes
With ten minutes left, stop working flags and do a final pass of the review screen for blanks. Then, if time remains, return to the flags that were genuine maybes and not unknowns. Do not reread items you answered with confidence; nothing good happens there. If the clock is nearly out and flags remain, leave the answers you gave them. They were made with more attention than you have now.
When the exam ends, let it end. You will remember the eight items you were unsure of and none of the hundred and fifty you answered without effort, and your estimate of how you did will be worse than the truth for exactly that reason. The clock was part of the exam, and if you kept your rule, you used it. The rest is scoring.
The pretest items
Forty of the 200 items are unscored pretest questions. You cannot tell which. This means an item that seems bizarre or impossible may not count at all, which is one more reason not to spend five minutes on it.
Rehearse the rule
Use it on every practice test, with a real timer, until it is automatic. The exam is not the place to try a new habit.
The clock is part of the exam. Candidates who treat it as a resource to allocate, rather than a threat to react to, finish with time to spare and answers on every item.