550 unofficial score must be wrong

sp19 · Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 2:29 pm Post subject:

I am new to this forum and tempted to write here, because of my similar experience in the real GMAT. I scored fairly well around 630 in MGMAT practice tests but 580- 600 in GMATPrep. In the real exam I got 530 just because the verbal section was screwed.

At home, in the practic tests I used to get 30-32 scaled scores consistently but I landed up with a 20 in the real one. I feel that the real exam can sometime do things incorrectly. Is it possible ??

My experience has been exactly reverse than what is commonly thought. I found the Quant easy and it kept throwing me easy questions. And I thought that I am performing bad that is why I am getting easy questions, however, I scored 43. I know this is not a great score but still it was much better than verbal.

On the other hand, I found verbal kept throwing very complicated SCs and RCs and I am pretty sure I answered quite of them wrong. Inspite of that I kept getting tough questions, unlike, the commonly known fact, that CAT adjusts to give you questions of the difficulty level that you are comfortable with.

My question is if I kept getting questions from the difficult pool, then why was my score so low ? I think the logic that goes behind CAT, is a low score if you asnwer 10 easy questions correctly, rather than 5 tough questions correctly. Is that not the case ?

I am too tired of 4 months of study and hard work to see such a pathetic score. I was told that people can get 550 even if they walk into the room without prior prep.

I took the test appointment only after I made sure I started getting a consistent score of 600 atleast. But I now believe that those practice tests do not help you give correct estimate of how your real score would be.

Thanks.

BlueRain · Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 4:48 pm Post subject:

Way to dig up a thread from more than a year ago. (OP posted March 2007)

Feels like the same kind of experience except there is no ScoreTop issue when OP posted. Confused

I think mental stamina might be an issue here if people do not practice the AWA + Q + V format, because by the time you reach V on the real time, you are either finished or almost finished V if you only did Q + V.

sp19 · Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 7:49 pm Post subject:

Is that the real reason ? I agree, I practiced most of the CAT tests individually for Qs and Vs, and almost avoided AWA most of the times.

For the next exam I am going to retake all the mocks full length. Atleast 4 or 5 of them and see if that makes a real difference.

However, when I recall the real test I just gave, I feel even if I were to rewrite the test, I would have chosen the same answers for most of them except a few. I felt the same for Q section but yet I scored miserably only in V not in Q.

Is the scoring mechanism tougher for V as compared to Q ? Or is it just my perception since I am not as good as in verbal as in Quant.

Thanks.

BlueRain · Posted: Thu Sep 04, 2008 10:42 pm Post subject:

In my perception, it wasn't that V scored differently. I felt the V questions were slightly different from what I was used to seeing on OG11. Instead of trying to narrow down the choice between 2, it seems like there was one clear choice all the time, so I actually thought it was easier in SC, which was my weakness.

The RC passage was short but more condensed in term of content. While you do not need to have the background information, it takes a while to process the passage to infer the background, which leads to the correct response.

CR, on the other hand, are logic-based, so personally I don't consider it a verbal thing (vocabulary/reading/grammar). I was always able to do well on CR because I can pinpoint the weakness/strength of the argument before I see the answer choices, and I just need to match the one that mostly resembled my guess.

That's my personal breakdown on the real GMAT V. Hopefully it helps. Rolling Eyes