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### Penality for leaving questions blank

by David@VeritasPrep » Mon Jan 13, 2014 6:26 am
Now the first thing that you want to do in terms of a timing strategy is to be sure to give yourself at least a look at each of the 37 questions. Here is the reason why:

Of those 10 questions that you had to just leave blank on the Quant section, at least some were very likely questions that would have been great for you. Perhaps questions that you could get correct in 1 minute! This is the problem with leaving anything more than just two or three questions at the end. What you have done by spending too much time on problems that are difficult for you (and that you probably missed anyway) is that you now had no time for the problems that you would have done well on.

What you need is a strategy to help you do 2 things: Get the questions right that you can and get away from the questions that are going to take to long and you will end up missing anyway.

You need to do a sort of triage like they do at the hospital. Figure out what is wrong with the patients and decide where to devote your energy. This article "think like a doctor and diagnose your way to success" is designed to help you do just that. Pay attention to the drill used in the article to help you understand when you should slow down and get a question right and when you should guess on the question and move on. https://www.beatthegmat.com/mba/2012/04 ... at-success

So assuming that you get your timing strategy to a better place, you should hopefully not be facing more than 1 or 2 questions as you run out of time. However, if despite your efforts something goes wrong on test day you should still have an idea of what to do if you do run out of time.

GMAC has done the research and it turns out that if you have five questions to go and you are running out of time (10 questions is just too many to leave blank so the data was collected for 5 questions) you are better off at least entering a guess IF YOUR SCORE IS AT LEAST AT THE 50th PERCENTILE. Assuming that your score will be at the 50th percentile or above you will want to guess at all 5 before the time runs out.

However, if you keep track at all, you will know that you are running out of time long before you have five unanswered questions at the end. Here is an article on what to do when you realize that you have only 12 minutes left and still have 10 questions to answer. https://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2012/12 ... -the-test/
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by hsudhan37 » Mon Apr 28, 2014 7:41 am
hi i just scored 590 in my kaplan practice test
QA 17
VA 18

i got only 17 correct in quants but it says my quant percentile is 80 . how is that possible ? explain

also i got 18 in verbal and my percentile was very low in it . how does the system extimate the percentile in this system .
is it the same in Gmat also ?
also i guessed last 10 questions in a hurry as i was left with only 1 minute to answer these . what would have happened if i had left all these blank ?

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