GMAT Strategy

Hi Folks,

I took a free CAT by Kaplan online today and scored a 580. How indicative is Kaplan's score about one's actual level?

Have been preparing for gmat since quite some time. . yet to complete number properties, combinatorics, word problems in quant.. took this test as I was restless to see some improvement in my score. Last I took gmat prep with a lousy preparation in the first week of Aug and I had scored a dismal 570 then; that was primarily because of lack of conceptual knowledge and complete mismanagement of time.

I have heard and read that kaplan tests are tough and there's a huge discrepancy in scores between those of kaplan's and those of gmat prep's.

Weird thing is I didn't get my split score(quant and verbal). Instead, I got the percentile rank which is 51 in Quant and 58 in Verbal.

I felt the questions in verbal were way too different from what I saw in OG.

and in Quant, I saw a greater proportion of Combinatorics. In geometry, I saw 10 questions whereas in the actual test you see only 2-3 questions I have heard. The highest concentration is on Inequalities, mods, number properties in the actual exam according to my knowledge.


But yeah thanks to this test, I gotto experience IR first hand. Got the feel of how it would be. Felt 30 mins is insufficient for IR, may be because I was totally unprepared for IR.


and thanks again to manhattan gmat's blog on time mgmt by stacey Koprince, I was pretty calm and playing the game well as opposed to the last time I gave gmat prep when I was just rushing through to ensure not spending more than 2- 2.5 mins per Question..
Though I did get a bit nervous every time I realised I was spending way too much time on a particular question, a deep breath used to calm me down.

RC is a pain in the **** ; gotto beat this monster



I am planning to take master gmat's free CAT.

Has anybody taken that? How good is it as far as gauging your benchmark level is concerned?

From what I have seen, most of the free CAT exams are a little tougher on you than they should be...

Thanks Jim for replying.
I used the score estimator on gmatclub.com and it estimated this score to be around 640.

Hi Sach,

These are great questions. The simple answer is that we do a lot of work to ensure that our tests are accurate and calibrated to the actual exam. If you want to read a bit more about the subject, you can check out this GMAT blog post: https://bit.ly/P9UMtF.

On a personal note, I scored a bit higher on the real thing. However, it was not more that the margin of error that GMAC publicizes. I hope that helps.

Best, Jonathan

Thanks, Jonathan!
Why didn't I receive split score of verbal and quant sections? I just received the percentile scores.

Hi Sach,seems that u r discussing in the wrong forum

Which one is the right forum for this Question?