MDCAT Has No Negative Marking. Most Candidates Still Leave Blanks.

PMDC has confirmed there is no negative marking in MDCAT 2026. A wrong answer and a blank both score zero.

So a pure guess across four options is worth 0.25 marks on average, and costs nothing. Over 20 unanswered questions that is five marks you simply declined to take. On a paper where colleges separate by fractions of a point, five marks is not a rounding error.

Guess blind and you are at 25%. Rule out one obviously wrong option and you are at 33%. Rule out two and it is a coin flip.

This is why partial knowledge is worth far more on MDCAT than candidates assume. You do not need to know the answer - you need to know what the answer isn't.

Do the paper in two passes. First pass: answer everything you know, and for anything you don't, mark an option anyway before moving on. Never leave the bubble empty even temporarily - people run out of time and lose the marks they meant to come back to.

Second pass: revisit the flagged ones with whatever time remains. You will already have a non-zero-expected-value answer down for every single question.

Reserve the final few minutes to sweep for blanks. If time is nearly gone, fill every remaining bubble with the same letter - that is worth roughly a quarter of what is left, and it is strictly better than zero.