Help me understand my GMATPrep experience!

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Help me understand my GMATPrep experience!

by rajesh_ctm » Sun Apr 01, 2007 12:11 pm
I started preparations a little one and half months ago. My plan was to take first GMATPrep test when I am half through my prep.

Yesterday I took my first test and I don't know how my performance was. The Quant section started well. I cruised through the first 7 or 8 questions. Then there were a few tough questions. I have an engineering background and hence my ego didn't allow me to compromise. I spent more than 7 or 8 minutes each on two questions as I simply didn't want to select wrong answer. However much time it takes, I had to get it right. "I" can't do bad in Quants! This attitude cost me a lot of time. When I had 17 questions remaining, I had 17 minutes remaining. I had to hasten up and had to swallow my ego as I just had to mark quite a few random answers near the end.
I did not expect Quant experience to be so bad. It shook me up.

Verbal was ok, but I hadn't quite digested the shock in Quants.

After all that, when I finished the test, I was too afraid to see the score. But I got another shock when I saw 760 (Q49, V44). Now how can this be! I had 11 of 37 incorrect in Quants. But still I got 49/60? May be because I did the initial ones right? The wrong ones were Question no. 5, 17, 19, 20, 22, 27, 28, 29, 32, 35, 36. I don't understand the high marks in spite of so many incorrect questions! Does that happen in real exam too?

Even Verbal was confusing a bit. I did not know how I did until I saw the score. I had 6 wrong in Verbal.

Also, I found some questions in Quant in the GMATPrep to be tougher than the ones in Kaplan 800! Is that correct? Now I need to revise my match concepts a bit more deeper, and also practice more!

I am totally confused whether I should continue to give more time to the beginning questions or not. Because of that I had to miss many questions, but the score was good. Now what do I make of all this?
Please help!

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by beatthegmat » Sun Apr 01, 2007 7:15 pm
rajesh_ctm wrote:I started preparations a little one and half months ago. My plan was to take first GMATPrep test when I am half through my prep.

Yesterday I took my first test and I don't know how my performance was. The Quant section started well. I cruised through the first 7 or 8 questions. Then there were a few tough questions. I have an engineering background and hence my ego didn't allow me to compromise. I spent more than 7 or 8 minutes each on two questions as I simply didn't want to select wrong answer. However much time it takes, I had to get it right. "I" can't do bad in Quants! This attitude cost me a lot of time. When I had 17 questions remaining, I had 17 minutes remaining. I had to hasten up and had to swallow my ego as I just had to mark quite a few random answers near the end.
I did not expect Quant experience to be so bad. It shook me up.

Verbal was ok, but I hadn't quite digested the shock in Quants.

After all that, when I finished the test, I was too afraid to see the score. But I got another shock when I saw 760 (Q49, V44). Now how can this be! I had 11 of 37 incorrect in Quants. But still I got 49/60? May be because I did the initial ones right? The wrong ones were Question no. 5, 17, 19, 20, 22, 27, 28, 29, 32, 35, 36. I don't understand the high marks in spite of so many incorrect questions! Does that happen in real exam too?

Even Verbal was confusing a bit. I did not know how I did until I saw the score. I had 6 wrong in Verbal.

Also, I found some questions in Quant in the GMATPrep to be tougher than the ones in Kaplan 800! Is that correct? Now I need to revise my match concepts a bit more deeper, and also practice more!

I am totally confused whether I should continue to give more time to the beginning questions or not. Because of that I had to miss many questions, but the score was good. Now what do I make of all this?
Please help!
Hi Rajesh:

Thanks for sharing this experience with us--I can see why you are a little freaked out. :)

My hypothesis is that your results were fluke. I'm thinking that the questions you missed mostly fell in the experimental questions bin, and that they ultimately did not count toward your final score.

With regard to the difficulty of questions--it's quite possible to encounter questions that are more difficult than Kaplan 800--but remember, that's a GOOD thing. You want to be consistently seeing really tough questions because that means you are staying within the difficult bin, which means you are going to be scoring high in quant.

The most important piece of advice I can give you about your experience: you need to work on your pacing. It's not so important to spend more time on the early questions. It's REALLY important to have enough time to adequately answer all the question in a given section. You CANNOT spend 8 minutes on a single question!! :) I love your perfectionist attitude, but you have to give yourself something closer to two minutes per question.

Don't worry to much--it seems like you really know your stuff, given what you described. Just work on pacing and doing a lot of practice and you'll be in great shape.
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by rajesh_ctm » Sun Apr 01, 2007 7:25 pm
Thanks Eric, that helps!

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by Stacey Koprince » Mon Apr 02, 2007 3:25 pm
The test does not score based upon percentage correct - it's not like the tests we took in school. It scores based upon the difficulty level of the questions you get right and wrong. Even if you score an 800 (perfect score) you will have multiple questions wrong in each section. So it's not a fluke at all - that's exactly what you should expect to have happen on the real thing. BUT you could have gotten into worse trouble in the latter part of the test, so realize that any one question is NOT worth 8 minutes b/c if you don't answer all of the questions, the test marks those questions wrong automatically.

Anytime you spend 8 minutes on one question, you are by default saying EITHER that you are not going to do 3 other questions at all OR that you are going to rush on 5-6 other questions elsewhere on the test. So you are potentially sacrificing all those other questions for this one question - not a good trade-off. Be REALLY careful about that - it's easy to get into a very bad situation that way.

Luckily, it still worked out for you this time, and hopefully that will be true on the real test, but be careful.
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by RachelAL » Wed Apr 04, 2007 11:03 am
I had a similar problem swallowing my pride and moving on, but i found it must be done. If I was not already on the road to an answer by the time i was more than 1.5 minutes into question, I started to eliminate answers and made my best guess and moved on.
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by mbaprocrastinator » Thu Apr 05, 2007 12:31 pm
Interesting thread! My experience was quite the opposite. With absolutely no preparation and with an engineering background :) I did terribly on my quants section. The problematic area seems to be with the data sufficiency questions. I had the same "perfectionist" attitude and spent 5 minutes on at least 2 questions and had to do guess work at the end. Unfortunately that pulled down my quant score dramatically.

In short, I am unsure if I should take up my exam on the 12th of May (already scheduled) or pay the extra money and reschedule it again. Most likely, after seeing the amount of information and resources in these forums, I just might end up rescheduling and taking the exam in June or July.

Cheers!

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by rajesh_ctm » Tue May 08, 2007 6:56 pm
As it turns out, GMATPrep is an accurate measure of how much you are going to score. Two weeks after taking my first GMATPrep test, I took my second one. The experience was almost a repeat of the first test (described above). 10 incorrect in Quant, 6 incorrect in Verbal. Even the same breakup - 1 CR mistake, 1 RC mistake and 4 SC mistakes. Score 760 (Q50,V44), exact same as first one.

I thought it is not reliable, but my final score also came out to be very very similar (Q50, V44). So I guess it really is the best indicator of what's going to happen in the real test! This is a very helpful tool in the preparation. Use it wisely!

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by Stacey Koprince » Tue May 08, 2007 10:15 pm
FYI - it is not as reliable as that. Some people are, of course, going to get something very closely predicted by GMATPrep. But the standard deviation is still pretty wide, so overall, there will be a lot of variation.

The standard deviation on the official test (not GMATPrep - the real thing) is 29 points, which means that if you score a 650, you have a 2/3 chance of scoring between about 620 and 680 if you take it again and a 1/3 chance of scoring above or below that amount. And every simulated practice test (including GMATPrep) has a wider standard deviation than the real thing.

Having said that, yes, GMATPrep is still the best indicator, short of the official test!
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by rajesh_ctm » Tue May 15, 2007 7:33 pm
Yes, I think I generalized my experience. On second thoughts, if the scores were accurate, I didn't improve a bit in the last one month! One month before exam I got 760, fifteen days before exam I got 760, two days before exam I got 770 (with repeated questions) and in the actual exam I got 770. So last one month I hardly improved! But that is not correct. I think I improved a lot in the last month.

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by aim-wsc » Wed May 16, 2007 1:01 pm
thanks for the follow up ...
i mean reviving the thread...