670 to 760 (Q49/V44, IR 8, AWA 6.0) - No Stone Unturned for 8 Months

Hi rf4d3r3r,

Just adding to the question that Alchemist had put up...

I would like to understand how accurate are the kaplan gmat scores? I have taken the practice tests that are given along side the Kaplan GMAT Premiere 2015.

I just gave one test from kaplan and scored 690 (Q50/V34). However seeing the number of questions that I got incorrectly, I feel the scores are a bit inflated if not more?
When I attempted manhattan mocks earlier, they used to penalize the score for almost every incorrect question.

Also during review, i found that the questions which are tagged as high difficulty were all bombarded at the end and questions tagged medium were given upfront.
Since this is an adaptive test, i thought it should be varying the difficulty level of the question on a sequence of correct answers?

I don't want to remain under a false sense of achievement as till date the best scores that I have got in test preps like manhattan/veritas have only been 630.
Not only that, if i predict my gmat score using gmatclub score predictor for kaplan, it further inflates the score to 720.

I am really looking at a score of 700+, but I really want to know if i can rely on the kaplan GMAT practice tests to get a fair idea of the probable score on the actual GMAT.

One thing that I am planning to do is to see if I am able to get similar scores consistently and will give the GMAT prep exam (3,4) just before I plan to give the actual GMAT.

Waiting for your feedback regarding the same.

Vijay

There wasn't much difference in the quality of questions from the official sources. As I mentioned in my post, Exam Pack 1 and Question Pack 1 were great for repetition once the fundamentals were locked down. I would say the OG is great for a large pool of questions. I can't speak to OG 2016, but since it has many new questions since OG 13, it will have the more recent SC questions and should feel more like the real exam.

My SC score didn't vary too much between GMAT Prep exams and the actual test. SC didn't vary for me very much since I'm a native speaker, but I did learn how to eliminate sentences more quickly based on certain errors in idioms, parallelism, 2/3 splits, etc. Just use all the official materials you can and you'll be fine.

rf3d3r3r, Your LSAT RC and LR suggestion worked like a charm. Thanks for the useful tip. You can read my debrief (the link is in my signatures). Coincidentally, I got the exact same Q,V split as yours but my total is 10 points lower.
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As I said before, I think the Kaplan Premier tests are fairly accurate in modeling the difficulty of the test. If you were getting difficult questions at the end, that's probably a good thing - the CAT algorithm thinks you're doing well on the test! Do try the GMAT Prep exams at the end as those will be the best predictor of your actual score. Good luck.

Great job! Glad the LSAT advice helped you as much as it helped me. I noticed a few other posts from people who got the same split score but got a 750 as well. Not sure how to explain that, but it must involve the historical distribution of scores as well as the actual difficulty of questions answered. Great score, nonetheless.

Congratulations for the superb score

Amazing debrief! Thanks for sharing ... Loved the tip of using the dots method.

Hello,
I am a first time GMAT taker and have not started any preparations yet.
Could you please advise what are the best online coaching / classroom coaching options in Bangalore.
I am targeting the April 2016 admissions in one among the top 20 business schools in the US and hence aim at scoring accordingly (730 and above)
I need a lot of help with Quant and some help with Verbal.

I talked to a few coaching centers in Bangalore and they advise that I should target taking GMAT in Dec so as to target April 2016 admissions.
I was thinking of taking GMAT by mid Jan or Jan end. Will it be too late?

Updated post to remove references to older versions of books. Official Guide updates every year now, still the best source for questions.