Has anyone taken the Veritas Prep's GMAT Simulator CAT exams

Thank you for trying out the new test and posting your feedback! And congratulations on the score – while on the surface it may seem a little high (and I probably wouldn’t use it, as you said, as the “forecast for the lowest score to be expected”) I dug into the item responses in your particular test and it looks like the scoring behaved as expected based on your performance. (One clarification: In your post you mentioned that you left 8 questions unanswered in the Quant section, but it looks like you actually only left 6 unanswered.)

This probably isn’t all that important/helpful for your actual GMAT, but in the way of explanation – computer-adaptive tests score and “penalize” (for unanswered questions) using numbers you’ll never see (called “theta estimates”) and then convert those numbers to the scaled scores and percentiles. So on a scaled score basis the penalty for omitting questions doesn’t look that harsh, on the theta basis it was significant…you went from theta that gave you a “high” 49 to a theta that have you a score of 48. And based on your answer pattern, that 78th percentile that corresponds to a 48 looks to be just about right.

And while we have this discussion open – according to GMAC the way that the unanswered-item penalty is scored (and how it’s applied on our tests, too) is that your theta score is multiplied by the number of questions you answered, then divided by the number of questions total. So if you answered 31 out of 37 quant questions, your theta gets multiplied by 31/37.

These tests are fairly new and we’re still monitoring the scoring pretty closely so we really do appreciate the feedback. The scaled scores are pegged closely to the percentiles they represent, so your 48 in our system indicated that your performance on the quant ranks better than about ¾ of test-takers in the system. To date we’ve seen quite a few “my Veritas score exactly matched my official or GMAT Prep score” and others that are off by some, and we’ll continue to monitor that feedback to see if any shifts are necessary.

Most importantly, we hope that you use the diagnostic tools (how your pacing compared to the norm, whether you fell for trap answers, etc.) to improve your performance for your upcoming test day, and we thank you for your feedback!