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me_1234: Senior | Next Rank: 100 Posts; Posts: 78; Joined: Sun Nov 30, 2014 7:21 pm; Thanked: 1 times; Followed by:2 members

How Scoring Works - Question

by me_1234 » Tue Dec 16, 2014 2:48 pm

I just took another official practice exam and got a 690. I got a 42 on Quant but 21 out of 37 wrong. On my last test I got a 37 on Quant but only 14 out of 37 wrong. Is my increased score due to the computer giving me harder questions throughout the section? Just trying to understand how this works.

Sincerely,

Melanie

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Source: Beat The GMAT — GMAT Strategy | Tue Dec 16, 2014 2:48 pm

GMAT/MBA Expert

[email protected]: Elite Legendary Member; Posts: 10392; Joined: Sun Jun 23, 2013 6:38 pm; Location: Palo Alto, CA; Thanked: 2867 times; Followed by:511 members; GMAT Score:800

by [email protected] » Tue Dec 16, 2014 5:53 pm

Hi Melanie,

The scoring algorithm on the GMAT is far more complicated than most people realize. The number of correct answers on a section is not the only factor in what determines your score. The algorithm factors in a number of variables, including the relative difficulty of the question (if you're expected to get it right or not), the position of the question, whether the question is active or experimental (there are questions in both the Quant and Verbal sections that do NOT count), if you don't answer questions at the end (they're marked as wrong AND penalized), as well as a few other things. As such, the number of correct answers is a mis-leading statistic.

When reviewing a CAT, it's more useful to focus on WHY you got questions wrong than to focus on the number of questions that you got wrong. If you made silly/little mistakes that can be easily fixed, then those fixes are the easiest way to improve your score (assuming that not all of the questions that you got wrong were experimental). Since you're never going to know which questions "count" and which are experimental, there's isn't much use in focusing on that idea.

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Contact Rich at [email protected]

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Brent@GMATPrepNow: GMAT Instructor; Posts: 16207; Joined: Mon Dec 08, 2008 6:26 pm; Location: Vancouver, BC; Thanked: 5254 times; Followed by:1268 members; GMAT Score:770

by Brent@GMATPrepNow » Tue Dec 16, 2014 6:01 pm

First of all, Melanie, congratulations on the great practice test score!!

As Rich points out, your scores are not based on how many questions you answer correctly; they're based on the level of difficulty of the questions you answer correctly.

To illustrate this, I'll share an experiment I performed.

When I was writing the article Taking the GMATPrep Practice Tests Multiple Times (https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2010/03/ ... iple-times), I took GMATPrep Practice Test #1 four times, and each time I answered every second question correctly (I did this for the quant section only)

Given that I correctly answered exactly half of the questions each time, you'd expect my quant scores to be roughly the same for all 4 tests.

My 4 scaled scores were: 19, 23, 26 and 42

This represents a percentile range from approximately 8th percentile to the 63rd percentile.

So, don't worry about how many questions you answered correctly. It has nothing to do with your score.

Aside: If you're interested, we have a free video explaining the GMAT scoring algorithm: https://www.gmatprepnow.com/module/gener ... es?id=1251

Cheers,
Brent

Brent Hanneson - Creator of GMATPrepNow.com