Missing questions at the end of a section

Question

Hi my friends,

Let's say that you are doing really well throughout a section (whether it be Quant or Verbal), but you are behind on time. You end up guessing on the last five questions. How detrimental is that to you score?

I would think that the GMAT is not going to decrease the difficulty level dramatically within five questions if you were able to consistently perform at a high level. I realize that this is not an ideal situation, but I was hoping to understand how much you are penalized should this situation arise.

Many thanks,
Woohoo

bb · Answer

Hi. I think a few folks wondered about it and we have ran some experiments with GMAT Prep. You may get very excited about the results but before you do, I wanted to caution a bit since in the experiments, we have answered ALL of the previous questions correctly so ALL 20-something questions were answered correctly until we started getting questions wrong. Also, ALL of the last 10 questions were missed. You can see that resulted into Q49 on the GMAT Prep and V40-42 if the last 9 verbal questions were incorrect. This means we did not guess but intentionally chose incorrect answers for the last 9 or 10. https://gmatclub.com/forum/new-format-g ... 69682.html Also, this is based on the GMAT prep simulations and the actual GMAT while using (supposedly) the same algorithm, does not have access to the same question bank and we have seen examples like these for example: https://gmatclub.com/forum/got-2-questi ... 98828.html (I suspect this is due to a small database of questions that has mostly easier questions and thus you can't get enough momentum unfortunately in that case)

GmatKnightTutor · Answer

There's a part in the Official Guide that states there is a significant penalty for missing questions. May want to give it a read to see what it directly says.

MartyTargetTestPrep · Answer

I''ve seen people do pretty well by doing as many questions as they can and then guessing on the last handful. That this would occur makes sense, since you can miss more than five questions and score rather high on quant, and OK on verbal.

At the same time, I have also gotten the sense that, if your score is more in question when you get to the last five questions, you can really drive it down. For instance, let's say that you were just managing to score V37 and had already missed some medium questions when you got to the last five questions and missed all of those last five. From what I have seen, you could end up scoring in the low 30s.

So, if you're going to guess, then guess on some of the hardest questions along the way, and maybe on one or two at the end of the section.

vv65 · Answer

The GMAT is not expected to decrease the difficulty in the last 5 questions if accuracy has been high through the test -- but sometimes it does. The GMAT sometimes throws easier questions when not expected (don't know why, perhaps because the system runs out of hard questions). And if you get these easier questions wrong, then the score can reduce more than expected. See this post and the subsequent discussion: https://gmatclub.com/forum/v42-with-onl ... 67002.html The test taker had only 2 incorrect answers, and those were towards the end of the exam. Yet the score was only 42. Posted from my mobile device

Guest96 · Answer

MartyMurray 
What's the most reliable way to identify the difficulty level of verbal questions?
Personally, what I've found in most cases is that:
1. For CR and RC, the wordier the options are the more difficult the question is. The stimulus/passage of a CR/RC question is a small factor.
2. For SC, the difference between the correct and the incorrect options boils down to the difference between 2 phrases/words/clauses

I know that it's not good practice to predict difficulty levels, but I need to skip some questions to be able to complete the section on time.

MartyMurray · Answer

I think you just have to see what's hard for you and ditch if you're bogging down when solving a question.

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Missing questions at the end of a section

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