GMAT Math

Guys, I found this forum right after taking my second GMAT exam, trying to project a score combining all my best percentiles. I was really disappointed and confused after the second exam, which was 2 hours ago.

What happened was I got Quant(50, 90%)and Verbal(23, 30%) on the first try, when I happened to had a fever the day before; then I took the test a month later looking for a 720 with the knowledge that my verbal could be a lot better than just 30%. I went today and came back with a Quant(47, 73%) and Verbal(35, 74%). Do you see the problem here? Yes, the math part dropped dramatically. Regardless the fact that I am a fourth year college student with a math minor and I am from China(stereotypes are true sometimes, but failed this time), I don't understand how I did not feel any trouble finishing the math part before time ran out during my first shot but definitely stumbled today. I can tell that the two math parts I had were totally on different difficulty level. I am so confused now. Was I just really lucky the first time?

Some background. I studied for and took GRE before for grad school(and I am going to grad school instead of management school the coming fall). The concept of testing test takers logic skills in GRE is the same as in GMAT, so I did not prepare a studying schedule. Instead, I bought the official guide and planed to finished all the sample questions on the book and online. During practice, mostly just using the OG, I have my math part normally around 80% to 100% correct and my verbal about 50% to 80% respectively. Having this in mind, I was really expecting a easy 720. BUT I was wrong. I would say doing practice test is definitely necessary cuz it helps improve your timing skill. I learned a huge lesson about the importance of timing today: because I didn't finish the integrated reasoning AND math part on time, I pushed myself a bit harder without sacrificing much accuracy. I finished the verbal part with 30 secs left which I consider as an achievement(always had trouble finishing verbal part on exams like this). I would say the verbal part from today's test was about the same difficulty as from a month ago. But I don't feel the same way for math.

I don't call myself a math person, but suffering on math part in my second GMAT simply doesn't make sense because I had solid fundamental math training all through my life. Shouldn't it reflect a level that is at least close to what I reached on the first time?

Any idea? Similar experience?

This difference in scores is really well within statistical possibility. Probably just a bad day. I wouldn't read into it that much honestly. Your precise score is probably somewhere in the 48-49 range. Maybe do a bit more prep and take it again so that your scores are more balanced.

so you are saying it is possible that I was just unlucky that the "harder" proportion of the questions in the poll were drawn when I took it? I just want to make sure that I do not overestimate the difficulty or have wrong idea about the easiness of the math part. Because to work from 50 to 51, I think I need 20 to 30 hours. but trying to get 51 from 48 would be a lot more than that. Because English is my second language, I really have to put most of my focus on verbal since 80% on verbal seems to be a cutout for some top school.

Believe it or not, the same thing happened to me: the first time I took the exam, I had a bunch of relatively straightforward math questions, but the second time was a totally different animal - lots of exotic algebra, probability, and number theory, much of which I was surprised that the GMAT could test (and as an instructor with five years' experience, I have a good sense of what's inbounds, or at least supposed that I did).

I came to the conclusion that the CAT was "aware" of my previous test and wanted to pose me some experimental and/or unusual questions (and I suppose some were experimental, as at least one had an outright error in the question, so it clearly hadn't been proofread). I got the same score (51) both times, but the first math section I finished in about 50 minutes, and the second I sweated out in the full 75 - the second was much, much harder than the first.

What was particularly interesting is that on the first exam I had a question that I got wrong -- and realized immediately after pushing "confirm" that I had clicked the wrong answer. That was the only question of that type I had on the exam. Anyway, on the next test, I had maybe SIX questions on the exact same very limited topic, giving me a strong sense that I was being data mined or at least used to refine the algorithm.

First I want to clarify what you meant by this line in your post:

"I learned a huge lesson about the importance of timing today: because I didn't finish the integrated reasoning AND math part on time."

Are you suggesting that the time ran out and you did not select an answer for the 37th question on the quant? If that is the case then that would explain the difference, because there is a massive penalty for not completing the exam.

Another possibility is the trajectory of the difficulty level of the questions was different. For example, in the second attempt you did fairly well in the beginning, say answering all the hard questions, this means that the software will initially barrage you with harder questions. Now, it is easy to get sidetracked on the GMAT and end up sinking 5 to 6 minutes on the harder questions. If that is what happened, then you end up rushing during the back end of the test, and it gets harder to complete the medium difficulty questions, even though you may be absolutely capable of getting them right. Basically, if you improperly allocate your time on the harder questions then it takes away time from the medium questions, and missing a medium question in general will pull down your score far more than a harder question(at the higher score levels).

Dabral