MGMAT CAT1

[ritz]

Hi,

I appeared for a MGMAT CAT online last week & here is how i fared....
SCORE & OVERVIEW OF RESULTS
TYPE SCORE ESTIMATED PERCENTILE RANK
Quantitative 47 81 %
Verbal 34 72 %
Total 670 89 %

In Absolute terms, in Quant I got
14 700-800 right & 12 wrong
08 600-700 right & 2 wrong
01 500-600 right
In verbal, overall, I got 22 correct & 19 wrong.

I appeared for GMATPREP1, got 720. Appeared for POWERPREP1 got 740, & the Kaplan test, i got 720 as well.
What I think (this belief is also bolstered by many posters in the BTG forum) is the difficulty level of MGMAT was way beyond the actual i will face in the real GMAT. It tests many fundas of quant at the same time.
In a way it is good for us so that we are better prepared for the test but at the same time, it might throw us off a bit. The first question that was given to me was a 700-800 level. the next 2 were ditto.
Can anyone update me if I am correct or if I am way off the right track.

Also, if I got so many Qs wrong in quant, how come i got 47? However, I am still satisfied with quant but I have been getting 39-40 in Verbal, so i am a bit livid with myself in that. any updates or guidance is greatly appreciated.
thanks
Ritz

[Prasanna]

From my personal experience, I would say you are on the right track with your understanding. MGMAT is generally considered tougher than the actual test. The other thing is the number of questions you got wrong by itself does not determine your score. The dfficulty level would be the key. You may get a lesser score with lesser questions right.

[Stacey Koprince]

I've had pretty much equal numbers of students tell me our test is harder and our test is easier than the real thing. So... take that for whatever it's worth.

I agree that our quant tends to be more computation-intensive than the test. That's not necessarily harder.

Also, your comment about wondering how you got the score you got when yo had so many questions wrong - that's NOT how the test is scored. It's really important to make sure you understand how the test is scored.

You could get 50% of the questions wrong and still score very well - as long as the ones you're getting wrong are of very high difficulty level. When people post their scores and then add data about # right / wrong, they're focusing on the wrong data. The data you want to notice is the difficulty levels of the questions you got right vs. wrong. (That data is in your MGMAT score reports, too.)

In fact, I just had a student ask me why I called SC a strength of his when he was only scoring around 50% right. He WAS only scoring about 50% right - but the average difficulty level of the ones he got right was 710 and the average difficulty of the ones he got wrong was 750. That's the very definition of a strength.

As you get better, what you want to increase is the difficulty level of the questions you're answering, NOT (so much) the percentage correct. (Obviously, you don't want to be at 25% correct - but once you get into the 50-60% range, forget about % correct and focus on lifting the difficulty level.)