GMAC Test Prep Summit Part 1: Skipped/Omitted Questions and Time Management
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Andrew is the Assistant Director GMAT & GRE Programs at Kaplan. Click here to read more articles from Kaplan and to learn more about Kaplan's GMAT classes. |
Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the GMAC Test Prep Summit and hearing about the GMAT from GMAC’s VP of Research, himself a senior psychometrician (“psychometrician” = GMAT wizard). Over the course of the day I picked up a lot of invaluable nuggets about how the test is scored, and over the next weeks I’ll share these nuggets with you.
Today’s topic: skipped or omitted questions.
You can’t really “skip” questions on the GMAT, but if you run out of time you may leave some unanswered at the end and those questions are referred to as skipped or omitted questions. A few Key Takeaways:
- Skipped questions can hurt your score really badly – even worse than you think.
- It’s complex to answer how much a skipped question hurts your score, but given Key Takeaway #1 above, the complexity doesn’t matter much from your perspective.
Skipped questions hurt your score more when you are scoring high. Here is real data, shared by GMAC:
- If your percentile score is otherwise 70th, and you skip one question, your score drops to 65th percentile.
- If your percentile score is otherwise 70th, and you skip three questions, your score drops to 55th percentile.
The exact science is complex. In fact, these figures were presented as empirical results – implying that these results are not transparent in the scoring algorithm, but that rather, they must be inferred after the fact from test-takers scores.
Forget about that. Instead, meditate on those two bullet points. Five percentile points for one skipped question. Given that the effect is pronounced at higher scores, I’d wager that if you’re dancing near a 700 level performance on one section, around 90th percentile, then omitting one question could drop you a good 7 percentile points. Your weeks, months of GMAT prep that you’ve put in (around 100 hours for those scoring 700+) to raise the ceiling of your performance could be thrown away simply by mismanaging your last few seconds.
Lessons:
- Don’t omit any questions.
- While it’s generally not to your advantage to finish very early, it would be much, much better to finish a whopping 60 seconds early, if that’s what you have to do to make sure you don’t omit any questions.
More nuggets coming up. They are equally earth-shattering, so stay tuned.
3 comments
Vince Tobias on October 26th, 2009 at 7:05 am
The 2 bullets mentioned paint an incomplete picture.
Even together, they are insufficient to show that skipping questions have a worse effect on percentile than would getting the same number of questions wrong.
So, what were the GMAC's corresponding empirical results for:
* If your percentile score is otherwise 70th, and you get one question wrong;
* If your percentile score is otherwise 70th, and you get three questions wrong?
Andrew at Kaplan on October 29th, 2009 at 7:53 am
It's a good question - but the negative effect of answering a question incorrectly is much, much less than that of omitting.
On a CAT, the percentage answered correct is much lower than on non-adaptive tests.
Ashish on April 10th, 2012 at 1:47 am
Hi Waiting for more advise.