GMAT Prep Software Analysis and What If Scenarios

Thank you for sharing - yes, absolutely have noticed this a number of times taking the GMAT Prep. It does not seem to be a Myth at all.
I think the way that GMAC should explain the first 10 question myth should be different. I think their take should be that - It is impossible to to "trick" or "beat" the test by acing the first 10 questions and then do a poor job on the rest. However, they should also mention that if you screw up the first 10, it is your funeral. At the same time, I can see how they may be reluctant to talk about the statement #2 (screwing up the first 10) without immediately everybody jumping to the conclusion that they MUST do the first 10 right.

The bottom line is that you do need to get as many HARD questions right as possible and the only way to get to them is to do well on the first 10 questions because as you have noticed, you did not get any hard challenging questions down the road after stumbling on a few in the first 10.

Best Regards,
BB

Recently, someone told me that if I am doing good in the real GMAT exam, I would be seeing more of DS questions and less of PS. Is this true? Can some people who have given the exam recently, shed light on the same? Apologies if this is the wrong thread to post my query.

Proximus, I'm pretty sure that the DS/PS balance doesn't change much, regardless of how well you're doing on the test. GMAT DS questions aren't fundamentally more difficult than PS questions once you get used to them -- and based on the thousands of GMATPrep (and real) tests I've seen, the DS/PS ratio seems reasonably stable, beyond a little bit of randomness.

The GMAC has never given us any reason to believe that time spent per question is considered whatsoever in the scoring algorithm. This would suggest that completing the test faster would lead to higher scores, which is untrue as far as I can tell.

I suppose that someone could do the same simulations to the newer GMATPrep tests to see whether there are similar results, but there isn't much of a point, given that we now know the scoring algorithms on the GMATPrep Exams and the actual GMAT to be different in nature.

These scenarios are amazingly helpful in understanding the general GMAT scoring algorithm, but not the exact one. For one, there are zero experimental questions on the GMATPrep tests, but around 25% of the questions on the actual GMAT are experimental.

Hi Guys,

Just wanted to know , if these are true for actual GMAT as well ? I have been answering close to 75% of the answers correctly in GMAT Prep but the score is no where close to 600 wondering where should I improve. Will the score be different in the actual GMAT? If it is true for GMAT Prep and not the real GMAT, any other source which you guys can recommend for practice tests and which would give a score something closer to real GMAT.

Awaiting a quick reply as my GMAT is due soon.

Regards

Hi Rahullath,

The overall percent of answered questions correctly is much less important than the difficulty level of those questions, which is largely determined by the first 1/3 of questions in each section due to the adaptive scoring algorithm.

In general, I have found the Quant algorithm to be more severely "front loaded" than the Verbal algorithm in this regard. That is, overall performance matters more on the Verbal, and the performance on the first 1/3 of questions matters more on Quant. (The IR section is not adaptive and you are graded on the number of questions you answer correctly out of the 9 questions that count.)

Hey, would you mind eloaborating on what you mean by experimental questions?

Thanks

Hi sefwow,

Before a question is placed in the pool of 'active' questions that are scored on the Official GMAT, each prompt must go through a 'testing phase.' The most realistic way to determine if a question is fairly worded and assessed the proper 'level' is to 'test it out' on an actual GMAT Test Taker. It's a standard process that every question goes through, but it means that a certain number of the questions that you will face when you take the Official GMAT will be 'experimental' (and they will not count towards your score). EVERY Test Taker experiences this though, so there's no inherent bias/harm to your performance. You just have to know that not every question counts (and unfortunately there's no way for you to tell what an experimental question 'looks like' since those questions are written in the exact same style as all of the other questions that count).

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

I am no longer active in this forum.

I completely agree with Dabral on the issue of time management. Unless you're RIDICULOUSLY awesome at quant, you're going to miss some of the first 10 questions -- and that's totally cool. If you get stubborn early in the test, you'll risk running out of time later in the section, and that can potentially do a ton of damage. Missing easy questions later in the test is arguably a bigger risk than missing hard questions early in the test. And let's not kid ourselves: things can get really, really hard within the first 5-10 questions.

One interesting thing, though: when the GMAT says that there's a severe penalty for not completing the sections, that's not really the whole truth. It seems that failing to complete the section really isn't much worse than making blind guesses at the end -- despite warnings in some editions of the OG.

The GMAT folks actually ran a study on their own test back in 2009 to see whether you're better off guessing at the end of the test or running out of time. Here are their findings:



This is from the official MBA blog, circa 2009: https://www.mba.com/us/the-gmat-blog-hub ... ssing.aspx. I always found it interesting that the GMAT's creators aren't completely clear on this issue -- but apparently, failing to answer a few questions at the end of the test isn't as apocalyptic as we might have believed.

The full study is available here: https://www.gmac.com/market-intelligence ... 1491081791

Yes, agreed. The problem is that Exam Packs 1 (Tests 3-4) and Exam Pack 2 (Tests 5-6) draw from the same pool of questions for both tests. If you are a high scorer, then it's likely that you will exhaust many of the hardest questions on the 1st test in the set, since there are only 400 questions in the pool, compared to about 1,500 total questions for the Default Exam Pack that includes tests 1 and 2.

To avoid this problem, you could reset the tests...but then you might see repeat questions.

-Brian

One question difference, 4 points lower total Verbal score! Yes, it's clear that there is a penalty for not finishing. However, you did get one additional question correct as well, which explains some (but not all) of the difference in your composite Verbal score.

These scenarios are still accurate for the tests included in the free GMATPrep software, which has not changed much over the last 4 years. The problem is that the GMATPrep software does not use the exact same algorithm as does the real GMAT. Thus, there is no way to know for sure whether these GMATPrep results will be duplicated on the actual test.

Hey guys!! First of all, thanks for the amazing work you’ve been doing.

Is it possible to test these scenarios with the new exam pack released by Gmac????
Browsing in this forum (and others) I’ve seen that people have experienced scores not in line with the scenarios in this thread. And most importantly, it looks like they’ve had more problems with the second test they’ve taken; that is, lower scores with more questions answered correctly ( I know the importance of the order in the algorithm). As if the questions pool isn’t big enough to sustain two tests at high scores.

Yes, it is possible but not necessary since the exam packs do not carry a new scoring algorithm and simply work within the existing scoring system.
Moreover, Exam Packs do not have many questions in them (they have only about 1/5th or 1/10th of what GMAT Prep has, thus their accuracy is lower)

I was just reading through this thread for the first time in years, and saw this. In case you're curious, I'm fairly sure it's impossible to get a V51 with even a single wrong answer (ignoring experimental questions), and on GMATPrep tests, with one mistake I've either seen V49 or V50 scores, and with two mistakes I've seen V47 or V48 scores.

It's best to think of the Q51 level as analogous to the V45 or V46 level, which is where the percentiles line up (or at least did, before the Quant percentiles got skewed). There's a 'top end' on the Verbal scale that doesn't exist in Quant, and you need a near-perfect performance to get into that top end. And there's another factor at work - it's also almost certainly true that the hardest Quant questions are harder than the hardest Verbal questions, which means a mistake on a hard Verbal question hurts your chances at an extremely high score a bit more than a mistake on a hard Quant question would.

And I just tried to give kudos to your post above, warning test takers not to obsess too much about the first ten questions, but the kudos system doesn't seem to be working, so I'll just express my support here.

This is very definitely not true. The scoring algorithm takes no notice whatsoever of the time you took to answer a question.



This is also not true, unless you're talking about technicalities. GMATPrep and the real GMAT both use a 3-parameter IRT-based algorithm.