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03 Jun 2018, 06:06
Kudos
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Hi All,
I took the GMAT about a month ago and scored a 720 (47Q, 41V) and have decided to retake to try and boost my Q score up to a 49+. For my practice prior to my first exam I kept an extensive error log with data about what types of questions I was getting right and wrong - both for my CATs and for practice problems. My ESR results contradict those a little bit... Mainly in a couple areas:
- For quant, says my PS was equivalent to a Q40 and DS equivalent to a Q51. I am definitely stronger at DS questions but I was surprised at the huge discrepancy.
- For verbal, my CR and SC were both 96th percentile, whereas my RC was 78th percentile. This comes as a huge surprise to me as on almost all my prior practice exams RC has been my best category (usually goes RC > CR > SC)
I know there's no data more valuable than how I performed on the actual test itself, but I have collected a decent sample size through my practice. I'm just wondering how much I should read into these results vs. my other data (i.e., perceive RC as a weakness and CR/SC as a strength) moving forward when it comes to practice. Should I weight these results more heavily or use them as basically just another data point? Interested to hear your thoughts.
Thanks!
I took the GMAT about a month ago and scored a 720 (47Q, 41V) and have decided to retake to try and boost my Q score up to a 49+. For my practice prior to my first exam I kept an extensive error log with data about what types of questions I was getting right and wrong - both for my CATs and for practice problems. My ESR results contradict those a little bit... Mainly in a couple areas:
- For quant, says my PS was equivalent to a Q40 and DS equivalent to a Q51. I am definitely stronger at DS questions but I was surprised at the huge discrepancy.
- For verbal, my CR and SC were both 96th percentile, whereas my RC was 78th percentile. This comes as a huge surprise to me as on almost all my prior practice exams RC has been my best category (usually goes RC > CR > SC)
I know there's no data more valuable than how I performed on the actual test itself, but I have collected a decent sample size through my practice. I'm just wondering how much I should read into these results vs. my other data (i.e., perceive RC as a weakness and CR/SC as a strength) moving forward when it comes to practice. Should I weight these results more heavily or use them as basically just another data point? Interested to hear your thoughts.
Thanks!
04 Jun 2018, 12:31
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dicetherice
This isn't an easy question to answer, as you probably suspect.
The ESR does give you data about a real, current test that you took under test-day conditions. Despite our best efforts, practice tests - especially unofficial ones - aren't a perfect copy of the real thing. So, if you were comparing a single practice test to a single official test, I'd probably take the official test more seriously.
However, there are two negatives to relying too much on the ESR data. One, you don't have nearly as much data as you do for your practice tests. Without being able to see the exact problems you missed, you can't really know for certain what happened. Broad trends are probably meaningful, but there could be a number of reasons for smaller patterns. Maybe you're great at case testing on DS and a little weaker on more 'mathematical' DS problems - and you just happened to get more problems on test day that required case testing. It's hard to say.
The other negative is that the ESR is, as you rightly say, only one data point. There's some variability in any given test. We hope that there isn't a lot of variability, but there inevitably will be some. For instance, what if you take one test and get 100% of the Combinatorics questions correct, then take another test and get 0% of them correct? Does this mean you went from being good at Combinatorics to being bad at it? Probably not. It's more likely that you only saw one, maybe two Combinatorics questions on each of those tests, so a huge swing like that doesn't necessarily mean anything. The number of questions on the test is relatively small, and the number of questions of any specific type is even smaller, so the data will have inconsistencies.
For now, I'd recommend combining the data from your practice tests, any large trends in your ESR, and your own intuitions about how the test went. It may also be a good idea to take another practice test sometime soon (ideally an official practice test), because that can help you confirm whether the changes you saw on your official test were a fluke.
05 Jun 2018, 06:15
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ccooley
Thanks for the reply!
That sounds about right to me - I'm not reading too much into the PS/DS split because I think I might've just happened to get questions that played to my strengths for the DS. The RC discrepancy is confusing to me but may be explained by the fact that I have been doing more third party CATs than GMATPrep ones - I have noticed that verbal questions are more difficult to imitate than quant ones. I'm going to try and take more official CATs for this round of preparation. That should give me better data.
Thanks again.
