GMAT Focus Algorithm - importance of the first 6 Questions is GONE

Hi RishS94, please look for the previous posts in the same thread. I have my complete detailed %s posted there

Hi Maheshkv, I meant subsectional %iles i.e CR & RC percentiles for Verbal.

PS: My Verbal %ile was shocking 51

whereas both CR & RC sections are above 68. Hence would like to know how it was for you

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Hi RishS94, sorry i misunderstood your ask. Here you go on the sub-sectionals:

It's a good start.

I think the DI percentiles, and possibly the Quant Percentiles, will turn out to be lower than GMAC has predicted.

So, I think, to have a 700+ type of score, you should push your DI score into the 80s, and thus push your total score to 665+.

I think you can get away with DI at 76 (Just 2 more points) to get to 665 as long as your Q and V stay the same.
Introducing my new creation 😂 Franken-Calculator (actually it is quite accurate, please be nice to it ).

Thanks Maheshkv

Thanks for calculator,bb. How to get difficulty levels for mock questions as mentioned in you previous post?

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bb can you let me know how to get difficulty levels please?

I channel the power of my mind and harvest the knowledge of the forum.

Hi bb

The time taken for the lat question (which you willingly left unanswered) is 20 minutes. Is GMAC taking "time" as well into consideration?
Q78(52nd percentile) is such a low score even after 1 incorrect and 2 unanswered questions. Any thoughts?

I doubt there is time taken into consideration. I have not noticed any patterns with time, esp if you may guess on the test, and guess right. I may do the experiment one more time and take a long time in the middle on a correct answer.

P.S.
I have run the scenario leaving 2 unanswered twice now and I tried to answer all others correctly. I have again faced a strange issue where I missed 1 question (this never happens in other simulations, so clearly a curse) and I got a 79 this second time (first time it was 78). No idea about the reason for a slightly different score. except the first time, I got mostly easy questions (I missed diff 75% both times) and the second time, I got a harder section.

On GMAT Focus, if you mess up on your first section, you get an easier section and if you do well on the first section, the next one is harder but it looks like you need to perform better on the easier section to get a high score vs. harder section.

By the way, something else to comment is that your answer will not get submitted even if you choose the answer but don’t click next and submit.

I chose the correct answer on the question before last and it did not get submitted showing that it was unanswered. FYI. This is consistent with the old version of the GMAT prep and the old GMAT classic test.

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Hi bb, not sure if i had observed this pattern i took QA>VA>DI for couple of mocks i attempted and QA was 100% or 90 points all the time but Verbal did not seem that a lot difficult. Although my sample size (2) is far less than you might have as a reference.

But just a thought. And overall how do you rate the official mocks? I did not see them tougher when compared to old gmat. Up for your thoughts & comments?

The reason I run my iterations on the quant section is because the difficulty can be estimated and evaluated more precisely.

On the quant do you have only one question type. On the verbal, you have reading comprehension mixed in with critical reasoning and reading comprehension are tough to value it difficult for a number of reasons. You may get a passage with a few easy, a few Card or a few medium questions. I know some people feel that some passages are easy and others are hard but as we know, it’s a mix. so I haven’t done a whole lot of research with verbal yet.


To give you an idea of the hard quantitative section, that basically means difficulty of about 45 based on GMAT Club ranking that means across 21 questions that happens to be the average difficulty. So getting one question difficulty 25 and one question difficulty 65 and then another one at 85 and another 115 would basically mean 45.

Lower difficulty level on quant is closer to 30. This means you can have a few questions at just five and still a few questions at 55%.

There are some really hard critical reasoning questions in the new GMAT focus GMAT prep. hi saw some 85% difficulty questions and thought perhaps they were hyped up but after trying them, they were not easy to crack and I was not finding them easy. I’ll save my dignity and not disclose my answers 😂

PS. Interesting idea about measuring the difficulty of new GMAT versus the old GMAT. I may do that. I may take an old test and measure the difficulty levels. The main difference will be adaptability of the old test which will keep giving me harder questions whereas the new test does not seem to change questions based on my answers… for example I missed the first six questions and still got on average difficulty of 45. Same exact difficulty I missed just one and left two unanswered at the end.

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Thanks for your response bb. I completely agree with your pointers. Have you tried experimenting anything on the paid mocks, where they same too?

Let me know if you need any help on decoding the focus, happy to contribute!

I have not tried experimenting with the paid GMAT focus tests. The main reason is because they’re paid 😂


Actually, the previous version of the paid test only allowed to attempt so it would be quite wasteful… and it wouldn’t allow many experiments. I have not looked into the limitations on the new paid GMAT focus tests.

PS. I can use some help with some scenarios that I still need to run. I’m trying to understand what happens if I make mistakes every three questions or every four questions. Every two questions or making 3 right and 3 wrong and so forth.

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Taking the old, GMAT classic GMAT prep test one and answering every single question correctly, on the quant portion of the test,

The average Classic difficulty was 50.

So the difficulty difference between the two test is probably negligible. On one hand, disappointing but on the other hand, makes sense.
These difficulties are much more certain for the classic test and my guess is probably not properly calibrated for the focus test, yet.

Here is the difficulty chart of my GMAT Prep.... Would NOT say it is Adaptive either

Thanks for the analysis bb. May be one more insight i can add from my experience and inline with data, maximum level of difficulty/hard of questions slightly reduced from classic to focus.