GMATPrep Scoring

This topic has expert replies
Newbie | Next Rank: 10 Posts
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu Dec 24, 2009 10:02 am

GMATPrep Scoring

by santoshvn » Tue Dec 29, 2009 8:10 pm
Hi,

I completed my first Practice Test on GMATPrep last night and had some surprising results. I had a very poor quant section and answered 17 questions incorrectly. Even then, the scaled score was displayed as 46. The verbal section was better with 9 incorrect responses however the scaled score was 38. The overall score was 690.

Is it possible to get a 46 even with 17 incorrect responses? I am concerned if the conversions are typical or if it is a bug with the software.

I am really struggling with data sufficiency and sentence correction and would appreciate it if someone could guide me to books / sites / material that could get me going on this topic.

Best Regards,
Source: — GMAT Strategy |

User avatar
Site Admin
Posts: 2567
Joined: Thu Jan 01, 2009 10:05 am
Thanked: 712 times
Followed by:550 members
GMAT Score:770

by DanaJ » Wed Dec 30, 2009 2:10 am
Actually, the number of questions you get wrong is not the only thing taken into consideration when the software calculates your score. The difficulty of problems you get wrong and the way in which they're distributed (i.e. a string of 5 errors is much more severe than 5 errors spread across the 37 questions).

The fact that you got a 46 in quant with 17 errors but a 38 in verbal with 9 errors should not surprise you. Remember, it's not the numbers themselves (46 and 38 in this case) that matter, but their respective percentile ranking. A 38 in verbal is equivalent to 83% (you did better than 83% of test takers), while a 46 means a 76% (you did better than 76% of test takers). As you can see, these percentile rankings do follow to some extent the number of questions you got wrong!