Knewton GMAT Instructor
Joined: 04 Jan 2011
Posts: 50
Location: NY, NY
Schools:BA New School, PhD Candidate CUNY
Re: Please help. What is my score?
[#permalink]
08 Jan 2011, 17:19
One more thing about this, since it's a very common confusion: Most GMAT tests, including the real thing and most practice tests, have a significant number of unscored, experimental questions. This is how all test-prep companies and GMAC themselves find out the actual difficulty level of new questions. You will likely see about 6-8 experimental questions *per section* on the real test. Yes, that's really true, and it's a lot!
What this means is that the number right / number wrong can be VERY misleading. If you get 8 wrong answers but 6 of them were experimental, that's very different than getting 8 wrong answers with only 1 of them being experimental. This is a complexity to add to the fact that the test is Adaptive. Since none of the software tells you which questions are experimental and which aren't, there is simply nothing that any of us can infer at all simply from a number of correct or incorrect answers. Period.
Now, this isn't true for the poster's tests, because GMATPrep tests apparently include no experimental questions, but in general, it's a reason that looking at raw scores just isn't helpful.