Number of correct answers increasing but score decreasing

[swashbuckler]

Hi Everyone,

I'm trying to take a very methodical approach to studying as recommended on some of the Sticky posts here on Beat The GMAT.

So typically I will during the week focus on a particular section, learning tips, and strategies as well as practicing under timed conditions say 10 or 20 questions a night and noting my scores in a spreadsheet. Then over the weekend do a full Practice Test

So here's the thing. This weekend I took the GMAT practice test. I'd spent the week on sentence correction and was making pretty good progress. When I took the practice exam I got 12 right and 5 wrong in SC and in verbal overall I got 33 out of 41 correct. An OK score which I know I can improve.

What was the killer though, was that my overall score is going down due to my quant results (only 14 correct). This is partly due to me focusing on verbal in the last week but I never thought my Quant score would take me down to 350.

Strange stuff indeed and was wondering if other people have encountered similar skewed results.

[mayonnai5e]

In order to score well, you have to do well on all topics all categories across the board. I had a similar problem where I focused so much on quant for a week or two that I forgot some of the lessons I learned from verbal. My tactic against this was to switch topics every day - RC then PS then CR then DS then SC. Then interwove quant and verbal topics daily which I then tested every Sunday. You may want to consider taking a similar approach.

Number correct doesn't dictate your score - difficulty does. So yes you may have gotten more verbal questions right, but you missed more easy/medium level quant questions, which acts as an anchor on your total score.

My hunch is that getting difficult questions right bumps your score up a lot, but getting easy questions wrong drags it down even further. I can't be sure about that though.