Long-term Score Inflation on the GMAT
[#permalink]
08 Oct 2013, 11:59
Let's build a chart to track the changes in percentile ranking for various Total, Quant, and Verbal GMAT scores for each year going back to the early 1990s.
I suspected such a chart existed somewhere already, but to my surprise it's been impossible to find more than bits and pieces of data here and there.
If you post your results from actual GMATs taken any time between 1990 and the present, I will compile everyone's data into a chart that makes it easy to understand changes in the rate of GMAT score inflation going back into the era of the most recent paper and pencil tests.
Please include:
1) The year for each time you sat for the actual GMAT test (not practice tests; not even official retired paper tests)
2) The Total, Quant, and Verbal scores you achieved
3) The percentile rankings that you know for sure applied to those scores when they were first earned (using the scale that was current at the time; don't look up your percentile using a current chart because it won't be accurate for our purposes).
*If you can find any other bits and pieces of relevant data online from a trusted source, please link to it as well. I'll start the chart using whatever I can find and add a new comment later that lists the sources that have already been used. If you have old hard-copy test prep materials that had the current percentile rankings as of its publishing date, that's probably an ideal source for this kind of info.
My interest in this project began after I took one of the retired official paper tests (sold by GMAC) as my first diagnostic, and later found out that the percentile rankings for my scores no longer correspond to the modern standards since the test was published around 1995 (though I could not confirm the exact year). I emailed GMAC for a list of historical GMAT score percentiles by year, but I couldn't believe they replied by saying they do not choose to make that information public! So we'll just figure it out on our own.
Things we will learn from this project:
-Just how accurate are the OGMAT retired Paper and Pencil tests specifically when used as diagnostic tests?
-Did the rate of inflation change significantly in the years right after the switch from paper to CAT format?
-Something I haven't thought of yet? (please reply in the comments if you can think of anything I should add to this list)