Confused about my Quants Score in official GMAT practice Exam

Question

Dear All,

Kindly help me , I am quite confused about my Quants Score after I gave the first Practice Test Exam from mba.com

I got many questions wrong, however got a Q49 ??? .

Please find the attached file in this post containing the incorrect question pattern.

Is the Quants score evaluation for the Practice tests in mba.com at all reliable?

I am a retaker, I got Q36 in my first GMAT exam and wish to improve my score quite higher than the previous.

Previously before I gave my first GMAT exam I used to score around Q46/Q47 in the practice tests of mba.com however my test day was a disaster with scoring only Q36 in Qunats.

Kindly help in this matter

yashikaaggarwal · Answer

Is Your given the official mock score is among 1&2 official mock or the purchased one 3-6?

Posted from my mobile device

PallabiKundu · Answer

It is for the free mock tests that they provide on creating the account,test 1 ,kindly suggest

IanStewart · Answer

That looks completely normal, and if you've been scoring in the Q47 range previously, then a Q49 is nothing out of the ordinary. On an adaptive test, the number of questions you answer correctly is not very important. What matters is the difficulty level of the questions you get right, and the difficulty level of the questions you get wrong. If you get most of your Q48-level questions right, and most of your Q50-level questions wrong, you're roughly a Q49 level test taker.

I expect if you look over your test, you'll see that your wrong answers were almost exclusively on very hard questions, so you could get a high score with many mistakes. If your test instead had been full of easy questions, you would have much less room for error.

I expect if you look over your test, you'll see that your wrong answers were almost exclusively on very hard questions, so you could get a high score with many mistakes. If your test instead had been full of easy questions, you would have much less room for error.

PallabiKundu · Answer

IanStewart  
Kindly let me know what should be my best approach to get a Q50/Q51 standing in this situation, 
I am also facing time management issue, for example you can see the pattern of wrong answers in the attached screenshot,
the last few questions all went wrong, this happened since I had only 5 mins left in the last lap to answer nearly 10 questions,kindly suggest,
wish to write the GMAT soon, therefore what can be done in this little time.

IanStewart · Answer

First, there is an enormous difference between a Q50 and a Q51. It is the single biggest one-point jump you can make on the GMAT, in either section. The right and wrong answer pattern of a Q50 test taker often looks very similar to the one you posted above. The pattern for a Q51 test taker looks nothing like the one you posted above - it would have either no wrong answers, or a very small number of wrong answers. If your highest diagnostic score is a Q49, and you are taking the real test soon, a Q51 is not a realistic target.

In general, if you have very little time before a real test, there is not a lot you can do. You haven't really provided much information to go on, so I wouldn't be able to guess what would help you most, but even if you did provide more information, my advice (and any other expert's advice) is likely to be the same: figure out what you can improve at, and work on improving at those things.

There are three things I'd point out though, based on your comments above:

- if you had Q47 scores leading up to your last test, and got a Q36, your highest priority should be figuring out why your test day score was so different from your diagnostic scores. If there is an underlying issue (fatigue, test day anxiety, etc) that you haven't addressed, you could see the same score discrepancy on your next test;

- if you truly did have only 5 minutes left on this test, with 9 questions to go, you only had time to properly solve two or three questions. But you had five correct answers among your final nine questions. Even if you completely solved three questions correctly, and guessed at the remaining six, your guesses still worked out well (you did better than the 20% right you'd expect from random guessing). So there's a chance this score is slightly inflated because of good luck, and it might make more sense to view it as a Q47-Q48 score;

- if that is the situation you were in, pacing is certainly one thing you could improve at. One thing to observe from this test: you can get a lot of the very hard questions wrong and still get a great score. Note that any time you spend on a question that you eventually get wrong is just time wasted (you'd have done better just guessing randomly and saving the time for later). So if you are having pacing problems because you're investing lots of time in the hardest problems, even when your solutions aren't going anywhere, then if you become more disciplined about moving on from those questions, your pacing might improve a lot, along with your score. But if that's not the reason for your pacing issues (if instead you need to get faster at math in general), then that's an issue that takes more time to fix -- you'd need to learn and practice faster methods and better ways of thinking about GMAT math. That's what my own GMAT books teach, but if you have limited time before your test, you wouldn't have time to take advantage of them.

If you were going to experiment with a different, more disciplined pacing strategy, I'd only suggest you try using it on a real test if you've had at least a couple of chances to practice it first. So if you wanted to use a new strategy, you'd want to take at least a couple of official diagnostic tests to get comfortable with it. And that way, you can see what impact the new strategy has on your score - if you get a Q48-Q50 with a new strategy, you should use it on test day, but if your score drops, you should go back to your previous approach.

Considering everything you've said above (and in particular, considering the result from your first test), I think you should probably be thrilled if you get a Q49 on your real test, assuming you're taking it in the next couple of weeks. If you can improve your pacing, which might be possible even in a short space of time, that might give you a shot at a Q50, as long as your conceptual foundation is strong across the board. Good luck!

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