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I cant make any sense of this.....anyone?

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I cant make any sense of this.....anyone?

by ethan42781 » Sun Dec 30, 2007 7:56 pm
Ive been studying for about 3 months now and I cant explain what is happening with my scores. After about 1.5 months of studying my scores shot up like 100 points. My very first practice test was a 560, and after my 1.5 months of studying they shot up to 690, 660, 640 and 720. So I hit the books again thinking that a little bit more studying would put me in the 700's consistently.
I went through the entire OG11 book and took my first practice test yesterday. I scored a measley 610. After much disbelief (and a little rage) I took another one today and scored 610 again! Its been 3 weeks since my prior practice tests so I guess Im rusty on the timing....But could I have actually gotten worse with more studying?
I take the real thing next Saturday. Im getting pretty nervous about my poor performance. Any advice?

THanks.
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by kishore » Sun Dec 30, 2007 10:48 pm
I guess, only problem with you is that your loosing focus.Be calm and concentrated.you will achieve.....
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by bates88 » Mon Dec 31, 2007 6:53 pm
Which practice tests are you taking? That is a huge factor here. GMATPrep and Princeton Review scores will be closest to your real score. Kaplan will be way off (I had previously heard 50-100 points, but just read in another thread, 70-120 points!), and Manhattan GMAT will be off too, but not as much as Kaplan. I think the person on here from MGMAT said their scores are a good 50 points off, but I'm not positive so don't quote me on that. :-)
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by Stacey Koprince » Tue Jan 08, 2008 10:30 am
Our (MGMAT's) scores are not "50 points off" - rather, the standard deviation of our test is 50 points. The standard deviation of the official test is 30 points, so we are pretty close to the same precision level as the real thing. (Which is to say - the real thing is not actually as precise as people assume it is. When you take the real thing, any score within 30 points of your score is NOT considered a statistically significant difference. So if you score a 650, you're "true level" is considered to be in the 620 to 680 range and, if you take the test again, you are most likely to score somewhere in that range, not exactly at a 650 again.)

Do compare test results from the same test maker; don't compare results across test makers.

How was your timing on your two most recent tests? The single biggest factor that has the potential to kill your score is timing. If you run out of time and have to guess or leave questions blank, the penalty is severe. If you guess and get them wrong, each question you miss at the end (without interspersed questions answered correctly) costs you about 2 to 2.5 percentile points - so if you miss the final 3 questions, your score will drop 6 to 7.5 percentile points from whatever you were scoring before you hit those three questions.

And if you leave any blank, it's even worse: you lose about 3 percentile points for every question you don't answer.

So if your timing was off enough to cause you to have to rush at the end and potentially increase your mistakes there, that could have a significant downward impact on your score. I don't know what tests you were taking, but if you have access to in-depth test analysis, go look at it (timing for each question, timing spread for questions at the beginning vs. in the middle vs at the end, earlier vs. later accuracy, earlier vs. later difficulty levels, etc.
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