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Nature of CAT

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Nature of CAT

by andy9923 » Fri Aug 01, 2008 10:47 am
Hi all,

A thought just came to my head yesterday. Is it possible to get a decent score on the GMAT by purposely guessing/skipping a chunk of questions in the beginning and answering everything else correctly? With the spirit of the GMAT being that it can reveal your true abilities by selecting question difficulty adaptively, wouldn't it be fair to say that there should be a cutoff point in the number of questions you can get wrong but still be able to recover lost grounds? If so, can that be used to the your advantage by skipping/guessing a few questions in the beginning since that can give you more time to figure out those real difficult ones (relative to your testing level) towards the end?

I thought about this after looking at analyzing score on a MGMAT CAT i took recently. Please shed some light if the real GMAT is different.

Thanks

andrew
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by missionmba » Fri Aug 01, 2008 11:31 am
IMO:
in the starting the test tries to determine a tenetative score from the first 10 -15 ques. later on it just tries to determine the actual score based on the difficulty of question answered.

In the starting the tentative score varies a lot (ex. 40-60 points) but later on in the test this variation starts reducing (ex. 10-20).

So it depends on the difficulty of question which u are answering.

Moreover, one should avoid guessing in series of ques. If u get more ques worng in a series the score will drop and then it will take quiet some time to recover.
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Re: Nature of CAT

by Ian Stewart » Fri Aug 01, 2008 4:59 pm
andy9923 wrote:Hi all,

A thought just came to my head yesterday. Is it possible to get a decent score on the GMAT by purposely guessing/skipping a chunk of questions in the beginning and answering everything else correctly? With the spirit of the GMAT being that it can reveal your true abilities by selecting question difficulty adaptively, wouldn't it be fair to say that there should be a cutoff point in the number of questions you can get wrong but still be able to recover lost grounds? If so, can that be used to the your advantage by skipping/guessing a few questions in the beginning since that can give you more time to figure out those real difficult ones (relative to your testing level) towards the end?

I thought about this after looking at analyzing score on a MGMAT CAT i took recently. Please shed some light if the real GMAT is different.

Thanks

andrew
It would require a long post (and still probably wouldn't be too illuminating) to explain how the GMAT scoring algorithm works, but I'd make two points:

-don't trust anything you conclude from test prep company tests. As far as I know, no test prep company simulates (or even claims to simulate) the GMAT scoring algorithm;

-answering questions intentionally incorrectly is absolutely the worst thing you can do on the GMAT. The time you save is worth far less than you might think, and you will simply kill your score by answering a series of questions randomly, unless you are extraordinarily lucky.

ETS ran a study about the GRE test, which is reasonably similar to the GMAT, except that each section is scored on the 800 scale. In an experiment, they gave a pool of test-takers 50% more time to finish the math section of the test- that's like having three minutes per question instead of two on the GMAT. By how much did scores improve? By 7 points on the /800 scale- almost a negligible amount. Time isn't worth as much as you might think, and correct answers, especially on difficult questions, are worth more than you might think. It isn't worthwhile answering questions incorrectly in the hope that you'll save time on the test.
For online GMAT math tutoring, or to buy my higher-level Quant books and problem sets, contact me at ianstewartgmat at gmail.com

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