Because the "trickiness" of the SAT gets so much discussion, it's fairly common for people to develop a minor hang-up about picking answers they think are too obviously correct.
I've had students who, after working carefully through problems, repeatedly talked themselves out of right answers because they believed that those answers were too obviously correct and therefore had to be some kind of trap. This kind of thinking is very dangerous because it goes back to the idea that SAT answers somehow exist independently of the questions themselves and are only correct because the College Board deems them to be so.
Now, if you just rush through a question without really bothering to analyze it or work through it carefully, then yes, there's a pretty good chance you might not come up with the right answer -- but that's because you didn't work carefully, not because the test is somehow unfair.
"Trick answers" are based on the fact that most people do not work carefully and are inclined to make particular mistakes in particular situations. Given the constraints of the multiple-choice format, they're one of the ways in which the test distinguishes between the people who really know what they're doing and the ones who are just trying to slide by on tricks of their own.
I think that a lot of the time when people complain about the supposed "trickiness" of the SAT, they're actually complaining about the fact that they have to work really meticulously. I don't deny it: it's hard, it's boring, and it just plain sucks a lot of the time. But that doesn't make wrong answers any less wrong.
The truth is that if you employ any careful process of logic to arrive at an answer, and that answer appears among the choices, there's a good chance it'll be correct. There are no "double tricks" (as some of my students have thought) in which the College Board anticipates the whole logical process you use to get the answer and then makes it something else just for fun.
They're not actually that mean. Seriously.
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