Veritas FREE TEST- LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY

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Veritas FREE TEST- LEVEL OF DIFFICULTY

by Reetgmat1986 » Sat Jun 20, 2015 1:02 am
Hello,

I took the veritas free test in August 2014, with some prepartion ( basically the OG and Kaplan), I was able to score a 650. I do not remember the break up exactly but i guess had a47 in q. I retook the test this year , infact a few days back and found maths pretty challenging and thought that the difficulty level has increased. I scored a 630 ( q47, V 30) and then retook the test and got a 650 ( q 46, V 34). The retake had a lot of questions from maths repeating ( despite this i had a drop) and approximatley 80 % new in English. I am a little confused on the accuracy of the score and am thinking how to plan about taking the gmat.

I want to ask any instructor from veritas that if within this year ( 2014-15), has the level of difficulty increased for the free test ?? I found the maths portion pretty easy last year and thus this year after so much prepration,as i sat to take the test, I had thought I would scoree a 700 plus but Alas!!!. I took the gmat early this year and got a 620 ( q44, v 31) and have been studying for quite sometime now. I have no clue as to where am i headed and when shoudl i consider myself ready for the exam?

I scored a 660 ( q 88 percentile and V 46 pecentile ) on the kaplan free test which i took a week back. On GMAT prep tests i have been scpre 650, 680, 720 ( GMAT 1,2, 3 respectivley) ( This was a month back) . I understand one weakness for me is the test taking strategy- most of the times i panic and i am not able to apply my mind fully? Please suggest me the next steps.

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by DavidG@VeritasPrep » Sun Jun 21, 2015 2:11 pm
I understand one weakness for me is the test taking strategy- most of the times i panic and i am not able to apply my mind fully?
I'll make my daily plea for the benefits of mindfulness meditation: https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archi ... on/275564/

And this article, courtesy of Marty: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/insp ... our-brain/
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by Reetgmat1986 » Mon Jun 22, 2015 8:25 am
Thanks for your reply. I have already started practising mediatation. Woudl also apprecite if you could comment on the level of difficulty for veritas test, teh scores that i ahve achvd and the next steps.

Thanks

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by Brian@VeritasPrep » Mon Jun 22, 2015 8:57 am
Good question about the exam difficulty. We have, indeed, updated our scoring at least a few times since your test last summer, and for many test-takers who would have scored in the high 40s on quant back then the effect has been that those scores are now slightly more difficult to reach.

As we monitor data between our tests and official or GMAT Prep tests, we'll make adjustments to optimize the link between our output ("theta" scores consistent with Item Response Theory - IRT - logic) and how people with those scores perform on official tests. We've refined those scores a little differently at different parts of the bell curve - it hasn't been just a "make the test harder!" decree or anything - but I do know that for those scoring in the high 40s on quant, we found that the trend from last summer's test was that they'd score slightly lower on official products so a lot of those metrics got dialed back slightly (so a "low 47" might now be a 46 or a "high 45").

Those adjustments were all done just on the scoring, and really just on the "lookup table" from IRT values to scaled scores. The delivery of questions hasn't changed, so if it "felt" harder that's not by any design of ours...we just make those periodic tweaks to the end scores as we monitor that data between our tests and official scores so that we can be as accurate as possible on the scores.
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