Mapping Economist Simulated Test Score to Actual GMAT

i took this test today and it has left me little confused. i got Q48 (with 10 incorrect) and V30 (with 11 incorrect) total just 630.
i was feeling the test is easy as i finished before time.

day before yesterday i took GMATprep test 1 and got 670(Q47- 12 incorrect & 35 V 17 incorrect).

now i am unable to understand that my no of incorrect ans have come down and wrong but still my score has dropped.

is it because i answered first 2 que on verbal wrong..? also my wong ans were more spread out on this test.

somebody pls help to understand.

A score can dip from one exam to another even with the same amount of knowledge ot the same percentage of correct/incorrect. The GMAT scoring algorithm takes many factors into account including where you make errors (eg making mistakes on 'graded' versus experimental questions, or the 'weight' of the question itself etc), how many mistakes you commit in a row, whether you finish both sections or leave questions out, whether the last few questions of either section seemed like they were guessed at (ie did you spend only a few seconds on the last few questions as opposed to the full time you should have), how you felt on test day - these can all affect score.

From one test to the next you can easily jump +/- 30 points (and even up to 80 or so) depending on where the mistakes are. So you can get the same percentage of right and wrong on two exams with the same amount of knowledge and yet have a score that differs by quite a bit. This is the same as the real GMAT. To illustrate, I can make a mistake every other question in the Quant over 5 exams (ie in every exam my percentage is 50% but have a score range from, say, a 15 to a 35, for example, which is quite insane, but it shows too that where you make mistakes can often be more important than how many. Overall, when a student wants to know where he/she stands, the best way to do so is to take the average after a few exams. This should get you to a fairly close estimation of where you are at.

It is possible that one exam may be off just because of where you made your mistakes rather than how many. But in general, our students tend to score within about +/- 30 points or so from what they get on our tests and the GMAT test preps.

I took the practice today and scored a 640 Q44/V35. I usually score around 680-720 on other CATs with a Q around 45 - 49 and V around 38 - 40.

Despite my lower than average score, the # of questions I got wrong were less than other CATs.

I feel that my verbal score was way too low given that I had only 6 questions wrong and 25 questions correct in a row. Maybe the score is really affected by how you perform in the beginning and in the end which is where most of my errors occurred. There was also a weird instance where I had a long reading passage (4 paragraphs) and answered only one question in a critical reasoning fashion.

Overall, I recommend looking at your estimated score with a grain of salt and look at the # of questions you got right/wrong. I made stupid mistakes (very freaking stupid mistakes) in math, but recovered well in verbal.

Interesting, because I tried Economist mock this morning and I got a 650. The break-down was 48 in quant and 32 in verbal. The funny thing is that I missed only 8 questions in verbal (no stripes of incorrect answers at all!) ---> I was doing really well in the exam with a number of bold-face, complete the argument, long science passage, full underlined SC's and all the funky things you see when reaching the +700 level. Also, I tried the free Kaplan CAT1 last Friday and I got a 740... I think this test was just a shout to devastate my morale...

Hi all,

I just took Economist Simulated Test ,and I am pretty devastated as According to that test, I scored 550. A day after tomorrow is my Real GMAT Test.

I don't know how it calculated the score,

I got 14 wrong on quant and scaled score is 44
I got 14 wrong on verbal and scaled score is 23

The only difference I noticed while reviewing is that I made 4 continous question wrong in start of the verbal section
And I made continous 4 question wrong at the end of quant section.
Everything else is similar.

One more thing, This test's analysis states that I took more time per question in some of the questions in verbal section than the 'should be time per question'. Does 'time taken per question' matter or the overall time of a section?

Please provide your valuable inputs. Don't know what to do now as my real GMAT test is day after tomorrow.