20 days left and no progress has been made.... Frustrated

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Brent@GMATPrepNow: GMAT Instructor; Posts: 16207; Joined: Mon Dec 08, 2008 6:26 pm; Location: Vancouver, BC; Thanked: 5254 times; Followed by:1268 members; GMAT Score:770

by Brent@GMATPrepNow » Fri Aug 07, 2015 11:26 am

iburnedmyrice wrote: I am so confused with this scoring system right now it drives me crazy. Since there is no way to understand the system, I decided to work on getting less questions wrong. This latest test I only got 5 and 10 wrong (the best I did so far) but the score is going down.....

Getting fewer questions wrong is better than trying to reverse engineer the GMAT scoring algorithm.

Your scores are not based on how many questions you answer correctly; they're based on the level of difficulty of the questions you answer correctly.

To illustrate this, I'll share an experiment I performed.

When I was writing the article Taking the GMATPrep Practice Tests Multiple Times (https://www.gmatprepnow.com/articles/tak ... iple-times), I took GMATPrep Practice Test #1 four times, and each time I answered every second question correctly (I did this for the quant section only)

Given that I correctly answered exactly half of the questions each time, you'd expect my quant scores to be roughly the same for all 4 tests.

My 4 scaled scores were: 19, 23, 26 and 42

This represents a percentile range from approximately 8th percentile to the 63rd percentile.

So, don't worry about how many questions you answered correctly. It has nothing to do with your score.

Aside: If you're interested, we have a free video explaining the GMAT scoring algorithm: https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gener ... es?id=1251

Cheers,
Brent

Brent Hanneson - Creator of GMATPrepNow.com

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iburnedmyrice: Junior | Next Rank: 30 Posts; Posts: 12; Joined: Tue Jun 16, 2015 5:43 pm

by iburnedmyrice » Fri Aug 07, 2015 1:00 pm

Hello Brend,

Thanks for the reply.

As I was doing the test this morning, I found the math questions fairly easy and i believe I could have been able to solve harder questions. Now as the video said the score is determined by the level of the questions I get right regardless of the number of questions I get right, but how to I get the machine to give me harder questions so that my score will be higher?

For now I cant think of anything but try not to make silly mistakes since 4 out of the 5 questions i got wrong were silly mistakes. However, now i am concerned that will the machine still give me the same level questions even if I get all the questions right? Since it doesnt matter how many questions i get right, I might get them all right and still end up getting only 49 for Quan?

Again, thanks for your post.

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[email protected]: Elite Legendary Member; Posts: 10392; Joined: Sun Jun 23, 2013 6:38 pm; Location: Palo Alto, CA; Thanked: 2867 times; Followed by:511 members; GMAT Score:800

by [email protected] » Fri Aug 07, 2015 4:24 pm

Hi iburnedmyrice,

The 'line' between a 700 and a 730 is remarkably thin, so when you admit that you made 4 silly mistakes, then THAT is something that you have to fix to pick up those missing points. At this scoring level, the GMAT becomes really 'sensitive' to little mistakes - especially on 'gettable' questions - if you make too many little mistakes, then a 700+ score is simply not possible.

So now your task is to define WHY you made those little mistakes and what you can do differently to keep those mistakes from happening again. In most cases, the solution will involve taking slightly more/better notes.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Contact Rich at [email protected]