Your overall score is based upon the percentage of takers who get a similar combination of scores. You could get a perfect quant score, but if you really blow the verbal, your overall can be lower than someone who did mediocre on quant and well on verbal. The official GMAT is scored based on how you do relative to other actual test takers, so you could get similar splits on practices, or even the real GMAT, and not exactly match your overall score. It depends on how well everyone else does to whom the standardize the scores. Your official score should be close to or the same as your unofficial score, but again, there is no way to tell until all the scores are standardized and compared. Hope this helps.

RHG wrote:Hi,

Today I got an unofficial 680 brokendown as follows:
Q: 48 (P: 83)
V: 34 (P: 68)
T: 680 (P: 86)

I have 3 questions about my score that are killing me:
(1) How could I possibly obtained a higher percentile on my overall score than on each of the sections?
(2) With those exact same scores I got an overall score of 660 in a GMAT Prep practice tests some few weeks ago. How could this happen?
(3) Based on (1) and (2), what are the chances that the official score will actually be lower than the unofficial one?

Thanks in advance!!
RHG

you won't believe that I scored Q49 & V34 in Dec'09 and got a score of 680.

I think something has changed! : :roll: :!:

The section scores are approximate, so your GMAT score can vary by up to 20 points for a given combination. I have never seen an official score that was different from the unofficial one, so I would bet that your 660 will stand!

The 680 (and percentiles) became official. Thank you all for the posts!