Finished a practice test and I have a question

bradenm2 wrote:My score on verbal was a 35, but I missed the last two questions. I know that the algorithm punishes you for a string of incorrect questions at the end. Would missing the last two questions cause this to happen? Or do you need to miss more than two in a row to get the extra penalty. If so, is there a good estimate to what my raw score would have been if I got one of those two questions correct?

Thanks for the responses!

It is not "a string of wrong answers at the end" that the test punishes you for. The penalty comes from not finishing. If you leave the last question blank (run out of time before clicking an answer), your score will drop 1 scaled point (that is, from 35 to 34). If you leave the last 2 blank, it drops 2 points. This is a HUGE penalty.

The "string of wrong answers at the end" is only bad in the sense that a string of wrong answers anywhere is bad. If you get 10 questions wrong in a row at any stage of the test, the algorithm will assume it has miscalculated your ability level and adjust your score down accordingly. This happens most often at the end of the test, because of timing issues.

I'd say your 2 wrong answers probably did not matter that much, any more than 2 wrong answers at the beginning or middle of the test would matter. Of course there is NO way of guessing how your score would be affected by any given change in your answers. It's possible they were both high-difficulty question the test expected you to get right and therefore there would have been no change. It's possible they were both experimental questions and therefore no change. It's possible they were both easy questions and therefore you got punished and could have gotten a higher score. This is no way at all of knowing or even guessing, so don't worry about it.

Remember: The added penalty is for blank answers, not wrong answers; streaks of right/wrong answers at ANY part of the test affect your score the most.

Ok, makes sense. For some reason I was under the impression that a string of wrong answers at the end punished you more than a string of answers anywhere else because the algorithm thought you were running out of time and purely guessed on the last few.