GMAT Strategy

Hey there, new to the forum

Haha, i had no idea there was such a big thing about GMAT - whilst i've heard of it before, i've never seriously understood how difficult of a test it could be , and vastly underestimated the time that i might actually need to put into it

Gonna graduate from uni soon, but im applying for management masters in london, some of which need a GMAT (and some that dont), so i thought "ok, ill go book my test sometime next week and prepare for it throughout the week"

Ahaha, well it happenes i guess, i left my preparation for the weekend and a couple days and a couple of days after and here i am. Hopefully if i do bad then i can prepare over a longer period of time and take it again ^^

Fortunately, i've done reams and reams of similar looking tests before (many loads of verbal reasoning and quant tests for other job applications) , and im also studying maths so quantitative areas are not a problem

I was wondering how you can actually go about scoring a GMAT - there are 37 questions in quant and 41 in verbal (or was it the other way around?) - like, in the GMAT prep if i get 75% of the questions correct (or 11-12/15) what kind of mark could i be looking at?
Is it even possible for someone who hasnt studied rigourously to get over 600?
Literally my prep is gonna be 2 days of going through stuff and the rest will be relying on my.. "natural" ability?
(live in UK, english is mother tongue, always been fairly proficient academically and quant wise)

Oh yeah, one more thing -

Can someone explain what QxxVxx means? I'm guessing it's the number of quantitative and verbal answers you got correct, though in my gmatprep it says theres only 37 quant and 41 verbal, so how is it possible to get higher than that?

Hey BrTarolg,

Welcome to Beat The GMAT! Since you asked about the scoring algorithm I figured I'd chime in with a few notes:

1) The GMAT is scored as a Computer-Adaptive Test (CAT), which means that it's more sophisticated than a simply percentage of right and wrong answers. When you answer a question correctly, the computer will feed you a more difficult subsequent question (with a higher potential gain to your score if you answer correctly again), and when you answer incorrectly it gives you an easier, less-valuable-to-your-score question.

2) Those scores that you see everyone post here (e.g. Q46, V42) are "scaled scores". Honestly, they're not all that helpful or easy to understand...the GMAT uses a band of 0-60 for each section, but reserves the extremes of each band for future expansion, so right now the highest possible quant score is 51 and a score of 46 on the verbal is considered 99th percentile. What's much more relevant is your percentile, since schools are really only concerned with how you perform relative to your competition.

3) To better understand the scoring system, I suggest checking out this blog post: https://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2010/08 ... algorithm/


As far as your prep strategy...while most people will need to prepare a little more thoroughly to score over 600, it's definitely not impossible to do so with a pretty limited study schedule. I had a study plan pretty similar to yours and did alright, so I know that it can be done. Best of luck this week...for your sake I hope that you do well and we don't see too much more of you on this site! But either way, welcome to BTG!

Ah thanks for the advice

Hopefully i can luck out a decent score first time round - the main problem im gonna have is when applications for masters finish! Don't want to miss deadlines

Wow.. these things are really taxing

managed to score 670 on the gmat prep

Almost ran out of time for quant, got 48q and 34v leaving me with 670 overall
Surprisingly i got 13 questions wrong in quant, whilst i reckoned i did a lot better than that

Obv could improve on verbal, sentence correction still bugs me to no end

If i get 670 on the real thing thats definately enough for masters apps i wanna do

edit: wow made some hilarious mistakes on the maths section.. especially when i got the right answers in my notes then chose the wrong one on the screen lol

Definately gonna grab a coffee in the morning tomorrow and not do this thing at 1am

edit:

also noticed an interesting error in the maths section:

integers x+y = 77
xy=?

1) x = y+1
2) x and y have the same tens digit

Imo, 1 = sufficient 2 = non-sufficient, but the test seems to think that each alone are sufficient

since 31+36 = 77 and 32+35 = 77, but 31*36=/=32*35

wow another one...

60 animals on a farm, 2/3 pigs or cows, how many cows

1) double cows to pigs (or 2:1 cow pig ratio)
2) >12 pigs

using first info, 60*2/3 = 40 animals are pigs or cows, and 2:1 ratio of cows to pigs so 40/3*2 = 26.666
which obviously is a strange answer...
and >12 pigs well.. means 26 cows (or 28 cows)

either way however you put them together, you can never have 2/3 of the animals on the farm as pigs or cows with either of the rules..

yet the test says you need both so im confused

Well, i ended up getting 600, 28v 44q

Was dissappointed, was expecting to score a bit higher, but nevertheless i meet the bare minimum borderline

I got a 6.0 (91%) in my AWA so thats obviously a plus. I've always felt my general writing skills to be very concise and analytical so clearly that helped me there (also i followed a very clear structure in my essays which might have helped)

Here is something I wrote about the scoring algorithm:

https://www.crackverbal.com/blog/gmat-sc ... ied-partly

Hope this helps,

Arun