Took first practice test today, need help

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Took first practice test today, need help

by ryantb55 » Thu Jan 06, 2011 7:35 pm
I took a GMATPrep test today and have some questions. First, I studied for about ten hours a week for 3 weeks one year ago. I had to stop because work got hectic. I haven't looked at the GMAT since until this recently and just quickly read through Kaplan's Math Review and strategies.

I completely BOMBED the Quant section. I am way too rusty with my math basics and didn't remember how to do a number of problems, so my time management was poor. About a third of the way in I decide not to worry about timing and just take an extra 30 minutes to finish the section. However, I did not know the test stops you automatically when the time is up. So I only answered 28 questions and got 12 wrong for a 33 quant score.

I crushed the Verbal section. I got 35 right and 6 wrong. I had 5 minutes to spare at the end and received a 42 raw score. Five of the six questions I got wrong were Sentence Correction, so I identified my weakness. GMATPrep said my Total was 63. Does this mean a 630? I used a score calculator with my raw scores and it said 620. Is this accurate? If so, I feel pretty good. I expected my verbal to be my weakness and to really shine on the math. I'm not worried about my bombing of the quant section. I will study and get that up. My questions are did I read my total score correctly? Is the GMATPrep Verbal representative of the actual test? I don't expect to always score in the 95%, but if I'm on the upper end before studying that's a good sign. How accurate are the score calculators that you enter your two raw scores? If I score near what I did on my Verbal, say 40, and bring my math up to a 75% (46) the calculator spits out 700. This makes scoring a 700 seem much more doable to me.

Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
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by Random Wok » Sun Jan 09, 2011 6:23 am
That's weird, when I did the GMAT Prep Tests, it just gave me an actual GMAT score. 700, 750, etc.

I would say that GMAT Prep is the most accurate test software out there. The only thing I would caution you with is that the GMAT Prep algorithm is slightly different than the actual GMAT test, because it is limited to the questions loaded in the software. While the GMAT Prep is more about how many you got right out of a fixed number, the actual GMAT is more computer adaptive, meaning it will ramp the difficulty up and down more drastically, to ensure you get a certain percentage of the questions wrong.

Basically, what I'm telling you is, expect to see questions that are harder on the actual GMAT. You don't have to get them all right to attain the score you did in GMAT Prep, just some of them. When I scored 46 Verbal on the actual GMAT, the difficulty went to a level I had never seen before on GMAT Prep.

A 46 Q 42 V does sound like a 700, but scores / splits can vary by 10 points. I've seen people with the exact same split as me with a different composite score.

Best,
Mark