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13 Dec 2021, 09:29
Kudos
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Hi
I was wondering if GMAT Cat 3 and 4 are easier than the real test, I was achieving Q49 and Q50 in real test conditions.
Today my official GMAT gave me a Q33.
I had never been under Q40-42. and had never got to Q49 and Q50 in real test conditions till GMAT CAT 3 and 4.
Is the question bank of the quantative section in this cats easier?
Best Regards
I was wondering if GMAT Cat 3 and 4 are easier than the real test, I was achieving Q49 and Q50 in real test conditions.
Today my official GMAT gave me a Q33.
I had never been under Q40-42. and had never got to Q49 and Q50 in real test conditions till GMAT CAT 3 and 4.
Is the question bank of the quantative section in this cats easier?
Best Regards
13 Dec 2021, 09:47
Kudos
Bookmarks
I took CAT 4 a couple of weeks ago. It was weird. I felt it was way easier compared to the default test pack(CAT 1 and CAT 2), paid CATs(3,5,6), and other mock CATs. I finished CAT 4 quant in 40-45 min and that has never happened before.
13 Dec 2021, 10:03
Kudos
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Yes, those extra tests don't seem to have as many hard questions as the free tests, but that actually doesn't affect your score. The scoring algorithm is taking the difficulty level into account, so when a test has easier questions, you need to get a lot more of them right to get a high score. There is, however, one caveat: when the difficulty level of the questions on a test doesn't match your ability level, there's a bigger margin of error. So if you take a test that feels pretty challenging for you, then you saw a lot of questions around your level, and you can treat the score as if it's quite precise. If you got a Q49 on that kind of test, you might think of the score as a Q48-Q50. But if the test felt easy to you, it would be better to think of that Q49 as a Q45-Q50. Of course if the scores on several tests agree, then that margin of error gets a lot smaller.
Either way, it sounds like you're at least at a Q45 level now, and a Q45 level test taker will essentially never get a Q33 on an official test only because of variance or bad luck. It's almost always true, when a test day score is that different from diagnostic scores, that you performed differently on test day, whether because you were tired, or stressed, or distracted, or because you used a different pacing strategy than normal. For some reason on this test, you answered easier questions incorrectly that you were consistently answering correctly on all of your other tests. If you can work out why that might have happened, you'll be able to take steps to ensure it doesn't happen again, and then your next real test score should be more in line with your practice test scores.
And before every prep company on the forum tries to persuade you that you have some gap in your foundation that their course will resolve, it would be, probabilistically speaking, exceedingly unusual if you had such a gap, that gap was not exposed even once on your practice tests, but was exposed on test day. There is some chance that's true, and you should reflect on the Quant content and ask if there might be a topic where you might be getting easy questions wrong, and work to improve on that topic. But the explanation is almost certainly something else. If you can figure it out, you should do just fine -- good luck!
Either way, it sounds like you're at least at a Q45 level now, and a Q45 level test taker will essentially never get a Q33 on an official test only because of variance or bad luck. It's almost always true, when a test day score is that different from diagnostic scores, that you performed differently on test day, whether because you were tired, or stressed, or distracted, or because you used a different pacing strategy than normal. For some reason on this test, you answered easier questions incorrectly that you were consistently answering correctly on all of your other tests. If you can work out why that might have happened, you'll be able to take steps to ensure it doesn't happen again, and then your next real test score should be more in line with your practice test scores.
And before every prep company on the forum tries to persuade you that you have some gap in your foundation that their course will resolve, it would be, probabilistically speaking, exceedingly unusual if you had such a gap, that gap was not exposed even once on your practice tests, but was exposed on test day. There is some chance that's true, and you should reflect on the Quant content and ask if there might be a topic where you might be getting easy questions wrong, and work to improve on that topic. But the explanation is almost certainly something else. If you can figure it out, you should do just fine -- good luck!
