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Penality for leaving questions blank

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Penality for leaving questions blank Post Sun Oct 21, 2007 1:21 pm
Stacey Koprince just shared this information in another thread--but the data is so important that I had to start a new topic with her message.

Here's what Stacey said:

***

Just want to add a tidbit. I just got back from a conference put on by GMAC and one of the slides illustrated the penalty for not answering 5 questions at the end (not guessing on those 5, but leaving them blank).

Your score goes down by 15 percentile points.

If you leave even 1 question blank, you go down about 3 percentile points.

So if you were at the 80th percentile and ran out of time with 5 questions to go, you would now be at the 65th percentile for that topic.

They didn't have the specific numbers for what would happen if you did guess on those 5 and got them all wrong, but the penalty will be nearly as substantial.

In other words, the penalty is HUGE.

***

The main takeaway--DO NOT LEAVE ANY QUESTIONS UNANSWERED ON THE GMAT. If you run out of time, blind guessing is better than nothing!

Thanks for the tip, Stacey!

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Post Sun Oct 21, 2007 5:16 pm
I just took a GMATPrep Test and my breakdown was as follows.

Total Score: 610
Math: 40
Verbal: 34

However, on the verbal I left the last two blank. How much would my total score have increased if I randomly guessed the last two verbal questions and answered them incorrectly?

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beatthegmat Founder
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Post Sun Oct 21, 2007 5:20 pm
gmat8000 wrote:
I just took a GMATPrep Test and my breakdown was as follows.

Total Score: 610
Math: 40
Verbal: 34

However, on the verbal I left the last two blank. How much would my total score have increased if I randomly guessed the last two verbal questions and answered them incorrectly?
I don't think there's enough data to on the algorithm to predict what your increase would be.

At a high-level though, the main takeaway from Stacey's message is that it hurts more to leave answers blank than incorrect. I don't know if we can read into any more details than that.

Good luck!

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Stacey Koprince GMAT Instructor
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Post Sat Oct 27, 2007 2:54 pm
Yep, we don't have more detailed info than that. Your overall score may or may not have changed if you guessed and got them both wrong. If you guessed and randomly got one right, though, that might have increased your percentile in verbal by about 2-3 points. You'd then have to look at a percentile chart to see what that would translate to in terms of score. I'm not sure whether they publish those charts or whether you only see that when you get your score report - if the latter, you can ask someone to look at the chart on their score report.

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