GMAT Prep Analysis Tool

Hi members, it was the end of June when I was shocked with my very first gmat prep experience. I got a 590 in that test & that very result made me realize that I had to work hard & plan more. It was that time when I decided to take leave from workplace & give some real time to the beast. After 15 days of study, I gave another shot to gmat prep & was shocked again to have a score of 710. Though I knew that 710 was partially because of my luck, I wanted to know the critical factor that made my score jumped up. I had gone through the bsd_lover’s gmat prep analysis but wanted to have a little analysis of my own. So I decided to enter my gmat prep results data in an excel file, so that I may review the details later (No wonder being a finance guy, I love Excel). It took hardly 15 minutes to enter the data in the input sheet & then I analyzed the patterns of question recurrence, mistakes sequence & % of each question type. I did the same analysis for three of my gmat prep tests & gained some very useful insight. I planned to share that stuff at the forum but couldn’t do so mainly because of the fact that I used a very rough data file, which in no way was suitable to share. I have worked on that analysis tool of mine now so that it may get the required form to be shared. So attached is that tool. I hope the said tool will help you guys in knowing the gmat question patterns & the importance of first 10-13 questions.

My Findings

1.GMAT Prep Score 630



2.GMAT Prep Score 710



How to use the tool

Imp Note:

1. I totally agree that gmat is a CAT and the number of right & wrong answers doesn’t make much difference but still there are some points that one need to remember & the biggest of which is the importance of first 10-12 questions.
2. I am using some soft & standard chart colors of gmat club here in this post. The attached excel file has the regular chart graphics.



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Hussian bhai remarkable job! I liked the excel sheet. It's amazing tool to analyse mistakes and will definitely use it.

Thank you bro! +1

With 10 mistakes in verbal I got v34 - I had 4 mistakes in first 10 questions.
=> its very important to nail the first RC.

Its definitely worth to spend more time initially in Verbal.

Thanks Hussain.
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Thanks for all the comments.

It will be great, if anyone taking the gmat prep can fill the results in input sheet & paste the snapshots of the analysis sheets on this thread. This will help all of us in having an overview of different score patterns.
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Great Work Hussain +1 to you.
I will be writing GMAT prep surely will post the analysis

I am not able to save the XLS that you have attached. Please check

Hi prashant, thanks for pointing the issue. Some bug was there. I have re-attached the file. Kindly do check now.
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Great work Hussain bhai....will update as i give my gprep soon and would request others to share their exp....

wow a jump from 590 to >700 is rockign . great work with the tool development. I will definitely use it . my test is on 3 rd of November .

Kudos for this beautiful and very useful post!
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Am I correct?

1. Verbal depletes the score faster than the Quant.

2. more than 10 mistakes in Verbal. Astalavista Baby!. Do the gmat again ! Ohh what a CAT

3. Initial 15 questions matter the most in both sections.

4. Final 7 questions matter the least in both sections.

Thanks Hussain15 ! It makes a lot of sense. And awesome work on the excel.

Kudos! Nice tool, thanks for sharing and definitely gonna use it when time comes for practicing CATs.

Great excel analysis..will definately help...congrats for such a great improvement!....

I will do the same analysis and will post my results here.
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Nice work Hussain! +1

I'm uploading screen shots of my analysis for everyone to see. I took GMATPrep back on Feb 09. You can see how I bombed the Quant with so many mistakes in the first 13 questions. I also think I had more than usual DS questions. And 3 of the 4 RC had only 3 questions. I personally prefer to have more questions for each passage, to make up the reading time.

Hussain, there is a small mistake in the Verbal chart in the Analysis1 page, the range of last questions is 31-41 instead of 31-37.

A small suggestion: it would be great to see in the chart how many DS or PS were wrong, and how many SC, CR and RC were wrong. I also include this questions in my error log, but just in case if anyone wants to quickly see which type of questions had more trouble with during the test.

Good point cano, but i would suggest just to disclose this info just in writeen without graphs as it would be too much graph info.
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You are right, that would be the best way. +1
I didn't mean to make a separate graphic. But anyways iIf the current graphic is too full of info then maybe the best place is in nearby cells below the Analysis2 # of Q Graphic.

If members will post their screen shots so we could compare to each other, it would be good to have the number of wrong questions each had. Even when having the same number of wrong questions doesn't mean the same score, it would reflect more convincingly how adaptive the GMATPrep is. For example, I had 17 mistakes in the verbal section and someone else had also 17, then comparing in which sub range of questions each had the mistakes will give us the difference in the verbal score, and we can see the limits of each score for a given number of mistakes.

The real challenge will be to gather the data from each member and make a big spreadsheet comparing all the results. But first we need the individual analysis. Please collaborate!

Thanks for pointing. I have fixed the typo.

I am working on your suggestion. Will revert back & update soon!
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Typo error fixed & a new analysis sheet is added showing the count of correct/incorrect answers of each question type.

Do let me know if it serves the purpose.
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