GMAT Strategy

Hello Everyone!

I took the GMAT Prep Test - 1 and scored a 610(Q47,V28).

I'm planning to take the GMAT in a month, and want to improve on Verbal(looking to get a raw score of 40+).

Few queries regarding the scoring mechanism.

Of the 37 questions in Quant, I got 17 questions incorrect(not kidding) and finished with a raw score of 47.

Of the 41 questions in Verbal, I got 16 questions incorrect but finished with a raw score of only 28.

In both the sections i got the last 6-7 questions as incorrect(lack of time management).

And the rest of the incorrect questions were scattered throughout.

One weakness - timing, which i'm working on improving.

Now,
- how did i get 47 on quant even after getting almost half of the questions as incorrect?
- how can i get 2 more points(49+) in quant?
- why is there a huge variation in the raw score between Q&V, though the number of incorrect questions, and pattern and frequency of incorrect questions were almost similar?
- how do i improve on verbal?

Thanks a lot in advance for your expertise inputs!

Good questions - and you're right to even title the post "scoring mechanism" because it all has to do with that. A quick executive summary:

-The GMAT is an adaptive test, meaning that it serves questions to you (and scores those questions) adaptively based on its perception of your ability level thus far on that section.

-So, in essence, if you've already demonstrated to the computer that you're well above average, it won't "waste" question slots asking you really easy questions that you should get right. It will instead seek an answer to "how far above average are you?" and therefore serve you more difficult questions trying to assess that. So it's not at all uncommon for high scorers to miss nearly half of their questions, as the test isn't lobbing you softballs...it's always trying to determine your upper threshold.

-On the flip side, if you've struggled thus far on the test the test will be serving you lower-difficulty questions.

-And that's a crude demo - it's certainly a little more nuanced than that, as the blog posts below will explain in a little more detail.

-Then for the scaled score / percentile discrepancies, that's all based on how the pool of test takers does. Particularly since the scale tipped to now well more than 50% of GMATs taken coming from outside of the US, in countries where quant skills are high but English is often a second language, and that shifts the percentiles to having a higher percentage of people score very high on the quant and a little lower on the verbal. Keep in mind that schools are very aware of these trends, so they'll look at the individual scores/percentiles as well as the overall.

Anyway, that's a quick explanation for what you observed. If you want to read a little more about "Item Response Theory" and the GMAT scoring algorithm, check out the links below:



https://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2010/08 ... algorithm/
https://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2013/07 ... ice-tests/
https://www.veritasprep.com/blog/2013/07 ... ptability/
https://poetsandquants.com/2013/07/21/th ... t-scoring/