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CONFUSED - High score but high no. of incorrect questions

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CONFUSED - High score but high no. of incorrect questions

by susmita2012 » Mon Sep 16, 2013 2:20 am
Hi,

I hope I am posting at the right place for my query.
I took GMATPrep Exam last Friday and scored a 740 and I am absolutely thrilled about it.
But my concern is when I looked at how many questions I got wrong there were quite a few.
In Quant I got 12 questions wrong and in Verbal I got 9 questions wrong.
My score breakdown is Q49(83 percentile); V41(93 percentile)
and overall 740(97 percentile).

Last year September I had taken the real GMAT and scored a mere 620 after repeatedly scoring above 700 in my mocks and getting similar no. of questions incorrect, mocks were from both Manhattan CATs and GMATPrep.

I am planning to take the exam in a month's time and I worried that I will bomb the real one again because I am not suppose to get this many incorrect questions.

Please help me understand the scoring and if it ok to get 9-10 questions incorrect in both sections and still score above 700.

I can send section-wise screen shots if that might help.

Sincerely,
Susmita
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by rakeshd347 » Mon Sep 16, 2013 2:32 am
susmita2012 wrote:Hi,

I hope I am posting at the right place for my query.
I took GMATPrep Exam last Friday and scored a 740 and I am absolutely thrilled about it.
But my concern is when I looked at how many questions I got wrong there were quite a few.
In Quant I got 12 questions wrong and in Verbal I got 9 questions wrong.
My score breakdown is Q49(83 percentile); V41(93 percentile)
and overall 740(97 percentile).

Last year September I had taken the real GMAT and scored a mere 620 after repeatedly scoring above 700 in my mocks and getting similar no. of questions incorrect, mocks were from both Manhattan CATs and GMATPrep.

I am planning to take the exam in a month's time and I worried that I will bomb the real one again because I am not suppose to get this many incorrect questions.

Please help me understand the scoring and if it ok to get 9-10 questions incorrect in both sections and still score above 700.

I can send section-wise screen shots if that might help.

Sincerely,
Susmita
Hi Sushmita,

Its normal and a high score is nothing to do with the number of questions correct. you can answer 15 questions wrong and still get a good score. It all depends on the difficulty level of the questions. You can score lower even when you have only 5 wrong as well if you are facing low difficulty level questions. Its same with MGMAT, KAPLAN, VERITAS and GMATPREP.
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by Brent@GMATPrepNow » Mon Sep 16, 2013 5:29 am
rakeshd347 is absolutely right. To illustrate what he's saying, consider this experiment I performed:

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.

However, 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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by susmita2012 » Mon Sep 16, 2013 7:56 am
Thank you so much rakeshd347 and Brent, your explanations have put my worries to a rest.

Really Appreciate,
Susmita
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