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03 Dec 2018, 00:15
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Just saw this ESR earlier .. Im still totally shocked
How could this person still keep getting hard questions when he/she had made tons of mistakes ?
15 wrong out of 30 questions ...
really adaptive ?
How could this person still keep getting hard questions when he/she had made tons of mistakes ?
15 wrong out of 30 questions ...
really adaptive ?
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03 Dec 2018, 15:33
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1. I don't think we have any reason to suspect (in general) that the GMAT isn't adaptive.
A lot of why it's adaptive is because it makes things easier for the GMAC. An adaptive test doesn't need to have nearly as many questions in order to reach a particular degree of consistency. Since they can get away with a much shorter test, the GMAC only has to write a fraction as many questions as they'd have to for a non-adaptive test.
Every question they write costs them multiple thousands of dollars in research and testing, so it's definitely in their best interest to keep the number of questions as low as they can!
2. I also don't think that this specific ESR shows anything suspicious. First, the difficulty of their questions does decrease across the second half of the test. (Note that an ESR is a bit of a 'blunt instrument', too - we don't know exactly how many hard/easy questions there were on any quarter of the test, and we don't know whether the hard/easy questions came early or late in that quarter. It's possible that the difficulty decreased dramatically at the very end of the test; we'd never know, since it's averaged across the entire last quarter.)
The changes in difficulty will also get smaller as you move through the test. Missing a lot of questions in a row is always bad for your score, but if you had to miss many questions in a row, it would probably be ideal to do it towards the late-middle of the test. (You don't get the huge score drop from the beginning that you need to recover from, but you also have time at the very end to recover slightly.)
3. Missing 50% of questions overall isn't that unusual. It's on the high end, but it's absolutely possible to miss a very high percentage of questions in a section and still get a surprisingly high score. https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... ions-miss/ This test is a bit of an extreme example, but it isn't that far off from data described in that article.
4. Two things make me suspect that this might be a 'bad GMAT'. Not that it's a bad score - but if you do something while taking your test that the algorithm doesn't expect, you can end up with results that make less sense! First, this person did much, much more poorly on CR than on the other Verbal problem types - so, they were probably periodically missing easy CR questions, while getting hard questions of other types correct. Since GMAT scoring doesn't look at the question types separately, the algorithm would only see that they were missing easy questions while getting hard ones right. That can cause strange results. I'm also suspicious because of the much lower accuracy at the end, compared to the beginning. It's more typical to have even accuracy through the test, or to have high accuracy at the beginning that then 'levels off' at 50-70%. This person may have run out of time and been forced to rush, which can give a poor estimate of your actual abilities.
A lot of why it's adaptive is because it makes things easier for the GMAC. An adaptive test doesn't need to have nearly as many questions in order to reach a particular degree of consistency. Since they can get away with a much shorter test, the GMAC only has to write a fraction as many questions as they'd have to for a non-adaptive test.
Every question they write costs them multiple thousands of dollars in research and testing, so it's definitely in their best interest to keep the number of questions as low as they can!
2. I also don't think that this specific ESR shows anything suspicious. First, the difficulty of their questions does decrease across the second half of the test. (Note that an ESR is a bit of a 'blunt instrument', too - we don't know exactly how many hard/easy questions there were on any quarter of the test, and we don't know whether the hard/easy questions came early or late in that quarter. It's possible that the difficulty decreased dramatically at the very end of the test; we'd never know, since it's averaged across the entire last quarter.)
The changes in difficulty will also get smaller as you move through the test. Missing a lot of questions in a row is always bad for your score, but if you had to miss many questions in a row, it would probably be ideal to do it towards the late-middle of the test. (You don't get the huge score drop from the beginning that you need to recover from, but you also have time at the very end to recover slightly.)
3. Missing 50% of questions overall isn't that unusual. It's on the high end, but it's absolutely possible to miss a very high percentage of questions in a section and still get a surprisingly high score. https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... ions-miss/ This test is a bit of an extreme example, but it isn't that far off from data described in that article.
4. Two things make me suspect that this might be a 'bad GMAT'. Not that it's a bad score - but if you do something while taking your test that the algorithm doesn't expect, you can end up with results that make less sense! First, this person did much, much more poorly on CR than on the other Verbal problem types - so, they were probably periodically missing easy CR questions, while getting hard questions of other types correct. Since GMAT scoring doesn't look at the question types separately, the algorithm would only see that they were missing easy questions while getting hard ones right. That can cause strange results. I'm also suspicious because of the much lower accuracy at the end, compared to the beginning. It's more typical to have even accuracy through the test, or to have high accuracy at the beginning that then 'levels off' at 50-70%. This person may have run out of time and been forced to rush, which can give a poor estimate of your actual abilities.
