(Un) Scientific analysis of gmatprep

bsd one request.Just get all Rc correct with an avg of sc n Cr...then what happens.is it again a s low as 13 or so?Kudos dude.

yeah and a good experiment would be to get all rc right and the rest wrong... and then see how the verbal score shapes up... kind of like you did for SC and CR. Kudos!

I concur...I usually have a 44-45 quant and always have the boldface as my first question.

Boy! What would we all do without you around here, bsd_lover! Man, awesome analysis and great contributions from Suyashjhawar too. Thanks guys. It goes without saying that this masterpiece deserves a (+1)..Gotta bookmark this one! Is it worth a sticky and moving this thread upto a place where everyone can easily access this. The Mods have to determine that, I guess.

Remember having read this in some earlier discussion. That if you finish that Quant section much ahead of time, your initial Verbal questions are extremely difficult. How true is that ??

this is just fantastic, kudos!

pls continue your second experiment on getting first 20 questions correct and remaining 17 wrong....this experiment will help us to calculate the time that we can spend on first few questions.

Don't read too much into getting a BF in GmatPrep. BF are no more difficult than other CR questions. I am sure that GMAC does not choose the first verbal question on the basis of the quant score.

One of the problems with figuring out the algorithm with your methodology is that the order of the questions changes. Imagine if you got 5 sentence corrections in a row and you missed all of them it is going to appear like Scs are more important. The scoring doesn't differentiate the question type only the level of the question.

guys..my advice to you all is to take every question as if your life depends on it..get it correct..thats the winner's attitude..

everyone of should aim to get 51 on Q and 51 on V...

thats the winning attitude..

thats the key to success..each and everyone of us is capable of this feat..

just remember you have 2 mins/question..thats the discipline you need..

There is a danger in drawing conclusions from a small sample size. I agree with Kevin that your Quant performance will have no effect at all on the questions you see in the Verbal section- the test would be unfairly biased if it did- and I expect what bsd noticed was just coincidence.

It is also untrue that SC questions are 'worth more' than CR questions, or vice versa, though I do agree that it's easier to improve on SC than on CR, so it is a good area to focus on during preparation for the test. I do suspect virflo is right in saying that RC questions come in batches- with one passage, some questions will be easier than others, though certainly some RC sets will be harder overall than other RC sets. As a consequence, it may be true that some RC questions are less important than others- those that are far from your ability level.

I do not agree at all with bsd's conclusion about the first ten questions, and take issue with the methodology. If you guess at the first 10 questions, and answer 2 correctly, that is an absolutely horrific performance. That's exactly how well you'd expect a ham sandwich to do on the first ten questions, by guessing. Since you're more than a quarter way through the test at that point, you don't have much time to recover. In addition, since only between 23 and 30 questions actually count (because of the presence of diagnostic questions), you may be more than one third into your test after ten questions. In any case, the conclusion is not relevant to any of us, since none of us will answer 8 of the first 10 questions incorrectly, unless we are genuinely sub-300 scorers on the GMAT. Yes, you can conclude from the result that it's a bad idea to guess at the first 10 questions, but I don't think that should come as any surprise. I agree entirely with terp, that the best strategy is to do as well as possible on every question, and it is certainly true that a series of bad answers at the end of a test can absolutely kill your score.

I have conducted similar experiments too.

My observations:
For Quants getting as many (~20-25) initial question correct helps boost the score. However this does not hold true in case of Verbal. If we were to believe that the GMAT is truly adaptive test, that questions get harder as you answer correctly and that the harder questions carry higher weight, then this whole scheme seems to fall apart for Verbal.

The Manhattan GMAT people have done their own analysis on this concept as well:

https://www.manhattangmat.com/gmat-prep- ... -annex.cfm

great post buddy.

I'm wondering. I kaplan free practice test, I got 4 incorrect in quant. it showed 45 scaled score. I was expecting atleast 49 here, but my first question was wrong. Does 1st incorrect answer scale down your score 4 points? or is just kaplan's strategy to enroll me for the course?

And also to build on top of this, the algorithm of GMATprep is not the same as the real GMAT (though very similar in terms of evaluating your abilities but not as through).

Many believe this was done to prevent reverse engineering.

My experience with GMATPrep Today
780 Q50 V48
On Quant missed 10 (3,5,14,18,19,23,30,32,35,37)
On Verbal missed 1

The last 10 Quant were mainly lucky guesses, when I went back and looked at them again, they seemed much easier than the first few. In fact I am currently researching the correct answer for number 3. I still haven't figured it out.

Never leave questions. Each un-attempted question translates to (roughly) a 3 percentile drop in the score. So the penalty to leave questions unanswered is severe.

please go through this thread as well (if you haven't already) - gmat-prep-software-analysis-and-what-if-scenarios-146146.html

Cheers

This type of analysis is priceless! bsd_lover, please keep up the testing. If you can post a detailed account of your methodology, others of us can also experiement and provide results to you in a sreadsheet, or screen shot of the right/wrong questions on the review page for the GMATPrep.

I agree with everyone here. The nature of the way CAT works is it's biggest vulnerability. A certain question at one point of the test IS weighted differently than the same question at another point in the test. For example, say Question A is a Level 45 question. It makes sense that this is so, because if you get Question A as the # 27 question once, it has 26 other questions to analyze with your response to that question vs. if you get Question A as the #2 question. Your correct answer to Question A at #2 should impress the CAT more than getting it right at #27, but again, much of how impressed the CAT is depends upon the level of questions received prior to getting Question A.