gmatrant wrote:If for a score of 47 one can make 13 mistakes, then for a score of 50 /51 how many mistakes can one make.
Also for a verbal score of 39/40 how many mistakes can one make?
Atleast a range would be great?

Do some searching on Stacey Koprince's old posts on this topic. She's done some research on this and discovered that you can make what seems like a lot of mistakes and still get a high score (around the 50 range perhaps for quant) on the GMAT.

Technically, if you can make it to the difficult bin of questions on the GMAT, you could get every other question incorrect and still score well because the GMAT has rated you as someone who deserves to be the 'difficult' category...

wongee wrote:Hey, to the point made above.

I scored a 49 on one my tests (PR), granted my Verbal was low, but I got only 5 incorrect on Quant. Here it says that you can get 13 wrong??? And still score over 650?

According to your point of getting to difficult bin questions, does that mean that accuracy on first half of qtns is important? I thought that was sort of a myth, but it makes sense, since if you don't have the upward trend you wont pull urself to the next level correct?

It was probably wrong of me to take a position on how the scoring algorithm works--very few people outside of GMAC truly understand it.

The general point I'm making is that you can get several questions wrong in each section and still pull off a great GMAT score. More importantly though--it's definitely not worth your time trying to decode the algorithm. Take each question one at a time, and try to get them ALL right if possible.

wongee wrote:Alrighty then!! Just that I was kinda ticked off that when i lesser wrong i got a lower scaled score...BUT, to your point, yes, we cant change the way the algorithm works - we can do the best that we can knowing that we'll get the appropriate result and THAT is what we should be concentrating on!

THANKS!

You got it, wongee

Think of your score this way: your score is the level at which you can answer about half of the questions correctly. If you can answer 100% of 600 level questions, you don't score a 600 - the test moves you up until you get to a level at which you can answer about half of them right.

This means that you can get a lot of questions wrong and still get a very good score. The vast majority of people get between 40 and 60% of questions right, up to about the 95th percentile or so. Only when you go above that do the percentages go up a little. (Even then, someone with a perfect score is still getting a number of questions wrong.)

The myth that you should spend more time on earlier questions is just that - a myth. Don't pay attention to what "seems intuitive" - your intuition will lead you astray here. The algorithm is extremely complicated. I've posted on that in more detail and you can go search those out if you want - but know that it is a complete myth that the earlier questions are "worth more" or "more important" than the later questions.