Penality for leaving questions blank

beatthegmat

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:

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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.

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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!

gmat8000 · Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 5:16 pm Post subject: Question

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?

beatthegmat · Posted: Sun Oct 21, 2007 5:20 pm Post subject: Re: Question

Stacey Koprince · Posted: Sat Oct 27, 2007 2:54 pm Post subject:

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.