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Percentile Discrepancies

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Percentile Discrepancies

by goldsteingrace » Thu Sep 27, 2012 5:23 pm
A colleague of mine took the gmat last week and scored a Q and V equal to mine, yet his overall score was lower?

I took the gmat last spring and scored 50Q 41V (750), but he scored 50Q and 41V (740)? His percentiles for the scores were also lower? If I remember correctly it was Q 90% and V 92%?

Anyone have an explanation?
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by machichi » Thu Sep 27, 2012 7:28 pm
Two things:

1) Percentiles are updated at least once a year. They were recently recalibrated this June in accordance with all the data of recent tests. So the percentiles changed and when you apply, you will be judged according to the most recent data. More test takers are doing better in quant and worse in verbal, so quant percentiles went down in the 40s and quant went up in the 40s.

2) Not all Q + V combinations are created equal. The algorithm to determine your final score is more than just a summation of your quant and verbal. It's about how many questions you get right. So the overal scores may not be the same, as in your case. That has nothing to do with percentiles.
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by Ian Stewart » Fri Sep 28, 2012 6:48 am
machichi wrote:
2) Not all Q + V combinations are created equal. The algorithm to determine your final score is more than just a summation of your quant and verbal. It's about how many questions you get right. So the overal scores may not be the same, as in your case. That has nothing to do with percentiles.
It's certainly true that "not all Q+V combinations are created equal", but it's not really because of "how many questions you get right". It's about rounding. The scaled scores that you see on your score report are not the scores the GMAT produces at the end of your test; those values are rounded off (actually the test uses a completely different scale internally, but that's not so important to understand). When the test produces your score out of 800, it uses your unrounded scores in each section. So if someone has a Q50/V41 score, that could perhaps be a Q 49.6 and V 40.6, which might be a 740 score, or a Q 50.4 and V 41.4, which might be a 750 score, and that's why the same scaled scores can sometimes produce different scores out of 800.
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