Nature of CAT

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.