GMAT Strategy

Hi Guys

This is my first post since I'm new to this forum. I took my GMAT exam couple of weeks ago. I was rather intrigued by the final score; especially the Verbal score. I managed a 680 - 49/32 split between Q and V. My overall score had a percentile of 85. My Quant %ile is 85 and Verbal is 64. My questions are:

1. How come my overall %ile is 85? Shouldn't it be lower?
2. I see that OG verbal review quotes a 86%ile against 680. Why is it that my score is 85%? Is it because 85 is the new 86 since lot of people potentially score in that range?
3. Can you guys tell me how many Q & V questions I may have gotten wrong on the test? approximately? The reason is - I'm still trying to figure out how I screwed up my verbal section!!

Thx

Here's how I would go about it. I am not 100% sure about this.

Your quant score is better than 85% of the people who took the test.
Your Verbal score is better than 64% of people who took the test.

Your overall score(split) is better than 85% of people who took the test.

As you might be already knowing percentile doesn't work as percent. You cannot average your individual percentile's to calculate the total percentile.

Just as an example, There will be guys who score 50 in quant and 20 in verbal. So even though they have better percentile than you in quant, They'll fall behind you on the total.

Hope this helps.

Thx vijayrr007! I understand the percentile stuff. That explains why 85%ile question.

Great explanation, Vijay!

And adding to this - this breakdown illustrates a pretty important set of points about the GMAT and its scoring:

1) You do not have to be perfect to have a great score. Being significantly above average on both sections will lead to a very high overall score. You can certainly outperform your section percentiles in the overall - 80th Q and 80th V will lead to a 90th+ score overall.

2) Therefore, it's important to seek out balance - I see a lot of posts here to the extent that "I'm at 49th quant and desperately need to get to 51". Well, if your verbal isn't at or above 75th you probably have a much more pressing need to bump that score up. You may have heard that "the verbal section is more important" (or vice versa), and usually that's a saying propagated by those who are very strong in quant. If you're already in the top 10% quant, you'll make a huge difference in your overall score by making gains from average to above average in verbal; and a significantly lesser improvement by eking out that extra point on quant. It's fairly rare for someone to be well above average on both sections, but not all that uncommon for someone to excel on one and struggle on the other. Balance will help you on your overall score - plus that's an important quality for schools even independent of the overall impact...they test you on both sections because they value both skillsets.

No one can tell you how many questions that you missed to get those scores. A "51" on either section means you missed very few questions, perhaps none on verbal, but anything less than that involves missing multiple questions - quantity unknown.

What may have happened on verbal was that you may have missed some questions that you normally would get right. Maybe some Reading Comp questions for example. It is very important to get the questions right at and below the level you hope to score. So perhaps you are very capable of answering 80th percentile questions right on the Verbal, but you missed to many 60th percentile questions and the computer did not trust in your ability to go higher than 64th percentile consistently.

Did you score consistently higher in the verbal on your practice exams?

As to the 680 being 85th or 86th, it is quite likely that the percentile has been adjusted downward. This has been the case in the past. A 750 used to be the 99th percentile!!

Thanks Brian and David. I guess you are right. I too suspect that I may have committed lot of silly errors and hence got some really simple questions wrong. Personally, I remember the last 3 questions 1 CR and 2 SC. All 3 were very tricky and I had to guess on them due to time constraint!

Btw, my verbal scores were pretty consistent in all my practice tests. Following were my scores a week before the test.

GMAT Prep1-50Q 44V
Manhattan GMAT - 47Q 41V
Knewton GMAT - 48Q 38V
GMAT Prep2 - 51Q 45V

Even on OG 12 and verbal review, my accuracy hovers around 85~90%. In summary, it simply boils down to silly errors. I will have to be careful next time around. I should take my time to see trick behind the question and yet not compromise on time.