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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 05 Mar 2019, 17:36
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Hi Bunuel souvik101990

Would you please run the scenarios in which middle verbal questions are answered incorrectly? may be the second 9 questions or the third 9 questions.

Thanks in advance.
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 31 Mar 2019, 10:01
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New Format - Verbal What-If Scenarios


Last year when Vercules ran the what-if scenarios in this thread we found some very interesting results. Not that the GMAT has changed (or just reduced in number and minutes), I decided to make some changes. I thought of doing things in quarters (9 out of 36 questions form a quarter).

1. Importance of the first 9 questions


In the first part of the test, I have tried to see what happens if we miss the first quarter entirely (i.e. the first 9 out of the 36 questions answered wrongly while answering correctly the others). To check for experimental questions and other question level based biases I ran the scenario thrice.

Experiment - GMAC says the first 10 questions are as important as the other questions. We test that theory. We have changed it to 9 because we want to take into account the reduced number of questions in the test.

Methodology - Run 3 instances of A) missing the first 9 questions . B) answering the next 27 questions correctly.

Result

- V28, V29, V30

Analysis - To make this analysis more effective, let's first check the scenarios:

First Scenario - Missed the first 9 questions - 4 CRs, 4 SCs and 1 RC - V29 - 57th Percentile
Second Scenario - Missed the first 9 questions - 5 RCs, 3 SCs and 1 CR - V28 - 52nd Percentile
Third Scenario - Missed the first 9 questions - 2 RC, 3 SC and 4 CRs - V30 -59th Percentile

It appears that there's no pattern to when the first RC will appear. In the second test, the RC was as early as the third question and as a result it made me miss the entire RC, which, I think, contributed to the score decline more than the other two tests. Also, while the average difficulty of the test was pretty easy/medium, I did see a few questions with 35%-55% difficulty on GMAT Club which will easily include them in the 700-800 level category.

Last year missing the first 11 questions resulted in the V22 (27th percentile)

Importance of the last 9 questions


Experiment In the second part, I decided to see what happens when you mark every question in the test, save the last 9 questions, correctly. Not to my surprise, I got a V40 or above every single time.

Methodology Run 3 instances of missing the last 9 questions on purpose but everything else marked correctly.

Result V40, V42, V42

Analysis In the first scenario the 9 questions I missed were - 1 entire RC (3 questions), 4 SC and 2 CR. In the second scenario, I missed 6 RC questions each. Clearly, even though RC questions are more on the test, missing SC and CR questions wrongly makes a bigger dent in the score.

Sidenote Last year, missing the 11 questions at the end resulted in a score of V38. So it is definitely a good news for test takers :)

3. Guessing SC but marking everything else correctly


This time we did a sectional test to see what happens if I guess all SC questions but mark everything else correctly.

Methodology: Mark CR and RC questions correctly and mark C for all SC questions.

Result: V37 with 11 questions answered wrongly.

Guessing RC and marking everything else correctly


In similar fashion, I wanted to check what happens when we guess RC but keep the SC and CR answers correct. Surprising results follow!

Methodology: Mark CR and SC correctly but mark all RC questions C.

Result - SHOCKING V34

Analysis: It is pretty clear that RC matters a whole lot more now than it used to. I would advise with caution against using this strategy. Practice your RCs and go well prepared.
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Hy Souvik,
In official Gmat, if I am left with 8 or 9 questions with around 10mins left.
and if I face an RC, what should be a correct strategy - to skip it or to tackle it?
Because I think, I will be able to answer SC and CR more comfortabling in that remaining time .(RC will take more time)

Thanks
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 31 Mar 2019, 11:09
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Hi nikhilbhat,

The pacing issue that you describe affects many Test Takers, but there's a good chance that it's NOT just about how you handle RC - there are likely several factors that are causing this pacing problem. Rather than have this discussion in this thread, I suggest that you start a NEW thread and provide some additional information on how you've been studying, your CAT/mock Scores, etc. If you'd prefer to have that discussion privately, then you can feel free to PM me directly.

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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 11 May 2019, 14:51
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Do you think GMAT recognizes that the user has guessed the answer if the answer choice has been selected in under 15-20 seconds? Bunuel
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 30 May 2019, 11:07
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Many of the conclusions drawn in this thread are potentially misleading. I'll try to point out where, but it will take me a few posts. Importantly:

OmerPelman

You probably know that their algorithm is top-secret
Show more

This is not really true - the algorithm uses a 3-parameter logistic (IRT) model, something GMAC has confirmed many times in their published reports. Now, anyone designing a 3-parameter IRT test is free to set certain technical parameters how they like, and no one besides the GMAT test developers will know how those have been set, but those parameters mostly have to do with question selection, and not with scoring, and they aren't very important. The other information that is secret, and which prevents anyone from 'reverse engineering' their score from their right and wrong answers on a given test, are the statistics associated with each test question -- the exact difficulty level of each question, for example (and the other two of the three parameters the algorithm uses - what are known as the 'discrimination' and 'pseudo-guessing' parameters for each question). But the scoring algorithm itself is just based on probability theory, and its mathematical basis is explained in countless academic articles, and even on wikipedia.

Knowing the mathematics behind the scoring algorithm will not, however, give a test taker any advantage whatsoever on the GMAT. For that reason (and because you'd need an undergraduate foundation in statistics, probability theory and calculus to even begin to make sense of it) I do not recommend any test taker learn about the algorithm. It seems many people believe, possibly because it is poorly explained in many prep books, that there should be some way to "outsmart" the algorithm, that there might be some strategy like "spend a lot of time on the first ten questions" that will maximize your score. There is no such strategy. It's exactly like a standard multiple choice test: I can tell you the 'algorithm' I will use to grade a standard test ("I will count how many right answers you have"). Knowing that 'algorithm' doesn't help you to do any better on the test. You'd still want to answer the questions correctly that you know how to answer, and not waste time on the ones you don't. The GMAT scoring algorithm is more complicated than 'count your right answers', but the best strategy is the same: answer what you can, and don't invest time when it won't lead to a right answer.

That said, if you do know how the algorithm works mathematically, you can draw certain important conclusions about the consequences of certain response patterns, and so you can draw the most probable interpretations from the studies presented in this thread. So when I have time over the next few days, I'll try to point out where I think people have arrived at incorrect conclusions from these studies.
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 30 May 2019, 11:13
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Cimet2018

I also heard that if you answer the last X questions under Y minutes, the software detects that you are guessing and penalizes you for not managing your time. Is that true?
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The GMAT takes absolutely no notice of how long you spend on a question. If it did, I and many other Quant experts would be penalized for answering some questions in five seconds (which is possible for certain question types if you either know the best way to think about them, or you've seen similar problems before). If anyone is telling you otherwise, ignore anything they're saying about the test and find more reliable sources of information, and if you do want to finish the test without leaving questions unanswered, don't leave yourself extra time to do that because you're worried the test might think you're guessing if you answer too quickly. Use all the time you can to solve problems and get right answers.
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 30 May 2019, 11:36
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Bunuel

5. Not Answering Last 10 Questions (ran out of time) vs. 10 Wrong Answers

Experiment: We will try to analyze the importance of answering questions in time.
Methodology: we will attempt answering the first 21 questions correctly and then wait till the time run out leaving the last 10 questions unanswered.
Result: Score - Q39. Percentile - 37th vs. Q49. Percentile - 75th. First 21 questions CORRECT. Next 10 NOT ATTEMPTED.
Analysis: I got lower score than in scenario 2 (First 21 questions CORRECT. The final 10 questions WRONG: Score - Q49. Percentile - 75th). This might indicate that answering all questions, finishing a test is very important. So, it's better finish the test and answer all the final questions, even incorrectly than not finish the test and leave final questions unanswered.
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There's a GMAC research report describing precisely how the test behaves in these two scenarios (when it is better to guess to finish the test, and when it is better to leave questions unanswered). In a couple of places (older editions of the OG and an interview with the test developer), they've described the penalty for not finishing the test as a 'proportional' penalty. Based on the one numerical example the OG provided, I always assumed that if you answered, say, 35 out of 37 questions, and left the last two unanswered, they used your score estimate after 35 questions, and multiplied it by 35/37. That's hard to test though, because there's no way to know what your score is after, say, 25 questions, so no way to work out how big the penalty is on any given test. If you answer as you did -- getting the first 21 questions right -- your score is not a Q51 inside the algorithm. Internally, the scoring scale goes beyond Q51 (internally, they track how many standard deviations above average you are, so the scale is theoretically unbounded). Scores above a Q51 are capped at Q51 because that's the top of the scale. So there's no easy way to tell if your score was simply multiplied by 21/31 in your experiment, or if they've softened the penalty a bit for not finishing, or if the proportional penalty is applied to something other than the Q6-Q51 score.

The GMAC research report about guessing vs not finishing concluded that for higher level test takers, it is almost always going to be best to finish the test, even if that means guessing randomly. In part that's because high scores suffer most from proportional penalties. But it's also because higher level test takers who guess at the end of a test are normally guessing at very hard questions, because the test is adaptive. And guessing at hard questions doesn't hurt you much. For a test taker who is below average, a proportional penalty hurts much less, but a guess hurts more, because that guess is much more likely to be on an easy question, and getting easy questions wrong is very harmful to your score. The reason GMAC can't give an exact answer about this question is because the test is not perfectly adaptive, and everyone's test is different - if the Q41 test taker guesses at two questions at the end, and those questions both happen to be easy, those guesses might hurt more than not finishing. That's unlikely though -- usually those questions will be medium-hard -- so guessing will be better most of the time.

From GMAC's own research, the best practice is likely to be this, speaking probabilistically: if you are a higher level test taker (Q40+ say) you should finish the test no matter what you need to do, even if that requires you to guess randomly. If you're somewhere near average (Q27-Q40, say) it probably won't make a big difference, but I'd still suggest trying to finish (though don't panic if you can't - it probably hasn't hurt you much). If you are a below average test taker (Q6-Q27) it almost certainly makes a negligible difference what you do, and in fact it might be better to not finish, if your only choices are 'guess randomly' or 'don't finish the test'. Of course the best thing to do is to finish every question, answering as well as you can, so this only applies to people who find themselves in a test situation where they won't be able to do that.
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 30 May 2019, 13:57
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souvik101990

Analysis: It is pretty clear that RC matters a whole lot more now than it used to.
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It depends what you mean by this - if, say, there are more RC questions (proportionally) than before, then this could be true. And because the test is shorter now, in some sense every question matters more than it used to (at least because every question is more likely to count, because the number of experimental questions has been reduced).

But if instead the inference is that each RC question carries a certain weighting, and each SC question carries a certain weighting, and those weightings are different (i.e. if someone were claiming that a random RC question is worth more "points" than a random SC question) then that is not true, and never has been. It will hurt you just as much to get a 500-level RC question wrong as it will to get a 500-level SC question wrong (assuming the other question parameters are identical).

There is a reason, however, that random guessing at RC questions can be more harmful than guessing at SC questions. RC does not adapt by question. If you're doing well, the test might try to give you a hard RC passage. But that just means the questions are hard on average - if you have four questions, they might be 300, 500, 700 and 700 level. If you're guessing at those, you're usually getting a 300-level question wrong. That's a really bad thing to do on an adaptive test. SC will adapt by question, though, so if you're doing well, and guess at an SC question, you'll usually be getting a hard question wrong, and that's not so harmful to your score. So a high level test taker, if forced to guess at one question, is taking less of a risk guessing at one SC question than at one RC, because the RC question will sometimes be easy. But a low level test taker will be taking less of a risk guessing at one RC question than at one SC, because in that case, the RC question is more likely to be a hard question than the SC.

So you'd expect to get lower scores guessing at RC questions and answering everything else perfectly, because you're guessing at more easy questions, not because RC is weighted more heavily than other question types. You should have found that to be true on the old GMAT too, though there will be enough variation from one test to the next in the difficulty of various questions (and in the difficulty level of the ones you guess correctly) that you might need to run several trials to notice a pattern.
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 31 May 2019, 08:49
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OmerPelman

The likely conclusion is that this is a flaw in the GMATprep software. Because if not, then they've granted us about twenty minutes of extra thinking time, just by guessing our way through every DS question after question #10. Since timing is at least one of the, if not the, most important hurdles on a standardized test, this means Pearson have allowed a terrifically gaping wide black hole of a hack to their algorithm. And given the standard warning in the Guide, I must say they would have to be terrific fools to do so.
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OmerPelman

An astounding hack, Sir! It means you can ignore all DS after Q10, which must represent a saving of approx twenty minutes. With that much extra time, you could nearly guarantee 100% correct in PS.

This is a hell of a hack in the prep software. I am at the edge of my seat to know if this works on the official test!
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There is no sense in which this is a 'hack'. Anyone capable of getting their first 10 questions right, and every subsequent PS question right (even granted roughly 50% more time to do so) is almost certainly a Q51 level test taker. That person would simply be capping their score at a Q49 or Q50 by guessing at their later DS questions.

Many people seem to believe that, given extra time, test takers could get all of their questions right. This is demonstrably false. Test takers who believe this should simply look back over their diagnostic tests, either timing themselves per question, or using a test that records time per question, and examine their performance on those questions on which they spent the most time. I've looked over hundreds of practice test results, and people tend to have a hit rate in the 30%-40% range on those questions where they spend 4+ minutes. In math, if you're going to see how to solve a problem, you're almost always going to see how to solve it quickly. If you don't see that path to a solution early on, you might never see it, which is why when people spend 5 minutes on a question, their answer ends up being essentially a guess anyway, most of the time.

That's not only true from my own experience, looking at test taker performance. It's also proven to be true in a large scale study:

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf ... .tb01905.x

That study gave thousands of test takers two GRE Quant tests, and gave test takers 50% more time on the second test. At the time, GRE Quant scores ranged from 200 to 800. I think most people would expect that, given 50% more time, their score would increase significantly - I'd bet most test takers would guess their GMAT score would go up by 50 to 100 points if they had 50% more time. But that's not what happens. In that study, with lots of extra time, GRE Quant scores increased from an average of 664 to 671, so not even by ten points. And the effect is greatest for low-level test takers, and smallest for high-level ones, so the test taker trying to use the 'hack' you describe is gaining almost nothing from the extra time they'd have, while at the same time sacrificing good answers to a lot of questions.

The above is one reason why the oft-repeated "spend a lot of time on the first ten questions" is such terrible advice. The extra time you spend helps you far less than you might think early in the test, and running short on time will hurt you far more than you might expect (if you believe the person giving this advice) on later questions.
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 01 Jun 2019, 12:01
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Bunuel

1. What is the importance of the first 10 questions?

Experiment: We will try to disprove the myth the way OG/GMAC positions it: the first 10 questions are not critical
Methodology: we will attempt the worst case scenario and will answer the first 10 questions incorrectly (not guess but incorrectly); then we will attempt to answer the remaining 21 questions correctly (not guess)
Result: Score - Q30. Percentile - 19th (!!!). First 10 questions WRONG. The next 21 questions CORRECT
Analysis: obviously something is not right with the myth about the first 10 questions. They appear to be very important on the Quant. If you miss the first 10 (probably not a very realistic scenario for most) you have no way of climbing out of the hole - almost all questions that were offered to me were generally easy/medium difficulty.
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I posted about this question in the previous GMATPrep scenarios thread, but I'll try one more time. To me, this experiment proves the opposite: that early questions are not more important than later ones. But we need to properly define our expectations in advance of a study like this: what score should we reasonably expect a test taker could achieve if they answer their first ten questions incorrectly?

From the conclusion drawn above, and the evidence used to support it (which I'm reading this way: "we get a Q50 with our first 21 right and last 10 wrong, but a Q30 with our last 21 right and first 10 wrong, therefore the first ten questions are especially important"), I'm inferring that some people expect you should get a similar score in those two scenarios. But you very clearly should not get even remotely similar scores in those situations (as I explain below). I find it remarkable you can even get a Q30 if you get your first ten questions wrong.

I'll simplify things a lot, to avoid any complicated math: for each question, the GMAT algorithm knows the probability that a 300-level test taker will answer correctly, and that a 500-level test taker will, and that a 700-level test taker will (and any other level of course). Using those probabilities, when the algorithm knows a test taker's right and wrong answers to many questions, the algorithm can work out using some probability theory what a test taker's most likely ability level is. That's all the scoring algorithm is really doing.

Now, let's ask "how likely is it that a 700-level test taker (so Q47 ish) would answer the first ten questions incorrectly?" We can't answer that precisely without knowing exactly how hard each question is, but since the test is adaptive, say we assume the first three questions are 500, 400, and 300 level, and then the next seven questions are all 300 level. GMAT questions, in the language of test theory, 'discriminate' very well: high level test takers rarely get easy questions wrong, and low level test takers rarely get hard questions right (except by lucky guessing, which the algorithm understands will happen 20% of the time or more). Using standard parameter values, a 700-level test taker will get a 300-level question right roughly 99% of the time. If that's not true for a certain test taker, that test taker simply is not at the 700-level, by definition. So you can already see how astronomically improbable it is that this 700-level test taker will get eight 300-level questions wrong in a row - it's (1/100)^8, or 1 in 10 quadrillion. Throw in the 400 and 500 level questions, then using the math behind the algorithm, the probability a 700-level test takers gets their first ten questions wrong is roughly 1 in 6,600,000,000,000,000,000. To put that in perspective, if one hundred 700-level test takers took the GMAT every single day since the beginning of the universe 14 billion years ago, this would still almost certainly never have happened: it would still be extremely unlikely that a 700-level test taker had answered their first ten questions incorrectly even one time, in 14 billion years. 700-level test takers simply never do this, so why should we expect the algorithm to give a Q47 score to someone who does, no matter how they perform later in the test?

Even the 500-level (Q30 ish) test taker almost never does this. It's 500,000 times more likely, if someone answers the first ten questions incorrectly, that a test taker is a 300-level test taker than a 500-level one, in the scenario I described above. In fact, the 300-level test taker also almost never does this -- even someone guessing completely at random is unlikely to do it -- but if anyone does, it's almost always someone at the absolute bottom of the scoring scale. That you can recover to reach a 500-level after that performance, even after proving to the test that you're worse than a domesticated cat pawing random answers at the keyboard, to me demonstrates that you can recover very successfully from an anomalously bad performance early in the test. Examining more realistic scenarios (while carefully defining expected results in advance) would demonstrate that.

The reverse happens when the test taker answers the first 21 questions correctly. It's extremely rare that even a Q50 level test taker will do this. You're well above a Q51 level if you do. So it shouldn't be surprising that your score doesn't drop too far after that point, even with an unusually bad performance at the end.

For test takers, the consequences are these:

- if you can get right answers early in the test, do - right answers are very valuable;
- if you can't for some questions, don't worry about it. The test can get hard early on, and a wrong answer to a hard early question doesn't hurt you any more than a wrong answer to a hard late question. You're supposed to get hard questions wrong no matter where they are in the test unless you're a top-level test taker;
- do not invest an inordinate amount of time early in the test. That will help you less than you might think early on, but will hurt you a lot later in the test.
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 19 Jun 2019, 21:30
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Hi,

I gave Prep 6 with only 3 questions wrong in Quants, wrong question nos are 21, 28 and 31. But I got a Q49 with 75 percentile.
I have also got Q49 in Preps 1,2 & 5 but the no:of wrong questions were around 9,10 & 8.

So, why did my score not improve in Prep 6?

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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 20 Jun 2019, 07:24
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AnirbanGmat

I gave Prep 6 with only 3 questions wrong in Quants, wrong question nos are 21, 28 and 31. But I got a Q49 with 75 percentile.
I have also got Q49 in Preps 1,2 & 5 but the no:of wrong questions were around 9,10 & 8.

So, why did my score not improve in Prep 6?
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One of my concerns about the experiments in this thread is that they give the profoundly misleading impression that the scoring algorithm cares for some reason which question numbers you get right and which you get wrong - I'm afraid this thread can give the impression that the algorithm gives a certain weight to say question #10, and a different weight to question #15. That's simply not true - the algorithm doesn't care about question number at all. It cares about question difficulty. And the difficulty of each specific question varies a lot from test to test.

When a test is full of very hard questions, you can still get a very strong score with many wrong answers, because even a Q49 level test taker is not expected to get Q50-Q51 questions right too often. But when a test is full of easy questions, you need to be almost perfect to get a strong score, because a Q49 level test taker is expected to get a Q29 level question right almost every time. The free official practice tests have a lot of hard questions in the database, so they're often very forgiving of wrong answers. But when you buy the additional tests, you can exhaust the supply of hard questions, and then you can end up taking tests consisting mostly of easy/medium questions. That's what happened in your case: you had a test with lower level questions, and needed to be nearly perfect to get a good score. Notice that doesn't actually affect your score at all -- you got a Q49 just as before -- but it does affect the number of wrong answers you can have and still get a Q49.

On the real test, the question bank will be deep enough that it should feel like your early GMATPrep tests - you'll likely see a lot of hard questions, and you'll be able to get a Q49 or Q50 with several wrong answers.
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 20 Jun 2019, 07:56
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Thanks Ian! Fully agree with you.

So the assumption of your statement or perhaps my inference of it, is that Test 6 is made up of mostly easy questions. Which therefore means that comparing one's results from Test 6 to other tests, such as 1 or 2 which have access to a deeper DB of questions, is not apples to apples comparison. Moreover, Test 6 also a diff experience from the Official GMAT which is more like Tests 1 & 2.

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I gave Prep 6 with only 3 questions wrong in Quants, wrong question nos are 21, 28 and 31. But I got a Q49 with 75 percentile.
I have also got Q49 in Preps 1,2 & 5 but the no:of wrong questions were around 9,10 & 8.

So, why did my score not improve in Prep 6?

One of my concerns about the experiments in this thread is that they give the profoundly misleading impression that the scoring algorithm cares for some reason which question numbers you get right and which you get wrong - I'm afraid this thread can give the impression that the algorithm gives a certain weight to say question #10, and a different weight to question #15. That's simply not true - the algorithm doesn't care about question number at all. It cares about question difficulty. And the difficulty of each specific question varies a lot from test to test.

When a test is full of very hard questions, you can still get a very strong score with many wrong answers, because even a Q49 level test taker is not expected to get Q50-Q51 questions right too often. But when a test is full of easy questions, you need to be almost perfect to get a strong score, because a Q49 level test taker is expected to get a Q29 level question right almost every time. The free official practice tests have a lot of hard questions in the database, so they're often very forgiving of wrong answers. But when you buy the additional tests, you can exhaust the supply of hard questions, and then you can end up taking tests consisting mostly of easy/medium questions. That's what happened in your case: you had a test with lower level questions, and needed to be nearly perfect to get a good score. Notice that doesn't actually affect your score at all -- you got a Q49 just as before -- but it does affect the number of wrong answers you can have and still get a Q49.

On the real test, the question bank will be deep enough that it should feel like your early GMATPrep tests - you'll likely see a lot of hard questions, and you'll be able to get a Q49 or Q50 with several wrong answers.
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 20 Jun 2019, 08:14
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Thanks Ian! Fully agree with you.

So the assumption of your statement or perhaps my inference of it, is that Test 6 is made up of mostly easy questions. Which therefore means that comparing one's results from Test 6 to other tests, such as 1 or 2 which have access to a deeper DB of questions, is not apples to apples comparison. Moreover, Test 6 also a diff experience from the Official GMAT which is more like Tests 1 & 2.
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I haven't used those tests much, but my understanding is that those tests try not to deliver repeat questions, so a high-level test taker can exhaust the hard questions by the time she takes test #6. But the medium-level test taker probably won't exhaust those questions, so test #6 won't seem easy to everyone. If that's wrong, I'm sure someone will correct me!

For a high-level test taker, comparing a test with mostly easy questions and a test with mostly hard questions is not an "apples to apples comparison" if you're asking "what score will I get with 3 wrong answers?" But it is an apples to apples comparison if your question is simply "what score will I get?" The algorithm knows how often test takers at every level answer each question correctly. So the algorithm might know that a Q49 level test taker gets 500-level questions right 90% of the time, and 750-level questions right 50% of the time. If a test contained 31 questions, all at the 500-level, then someone who answers roughly 90% of those correctly will get a Q49. If the test contained 31 750-level questions, someone who answers roughly 50% of them correctly would get a Q49.

The one important difference in those two scenarios is that the test can be much more certain about a test taker's precise level the more questions it delivers around that test taker's level. So if a test delivers mostly 500-level questions to a Q49 level test taker, that test taker will get almost everything right. The algorithm will know "this test taker is really good" but it won't be sure exactly how good. The test might say "this person is a Q49" but if you could ask the algorithm "what margin of error would you attach to that score?" the algorithm would give a fairly large margin of error. It would give a much smaller margin of error if it could deliver that Q49 level test taker a lot of 700-level questions. That's why the test adapts - the algorithm can give more precise scores the more questions it delivers around your level. And one consequence of that: a Q49 level test taker will see bigger score fluctuations on an easy test than on a hard one, because even one good or bad guess will make a big difference on an easy test.
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 20 Jun 2019, 08:38
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Ian, that makes two of us ;)

My understanding is that beyond Tests 1 and 2, Tests 3, 4, 5, and 6 have just the number of questions for that test - e.g. 31 so the depth of the question bank is non-existent. Whereas Tests 1 & 2 have a very large database of questions. Again, if someone has a diff experience, please correct me
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 22 Jun 2019, 11:01
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I understand we have concluded that the new GMAC software offers the same scoring algorithm as the actual GMAT, however, has anyone concluded if the GMAC software provides experimental questions just like the real GMAT exam. Theoretically, even if the scoring algorithm is the "same" these strategies wouldn't hold a lot of weight come test time, as you could be guessing/skipping questions which are experimental and thus do not count towards your score and vise versa.
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 22 Jun 2019, 11:40
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I understand we have concluded that the new GMAC software offers the same scoring algorithm as the actual GMAT, however, has anyone concluded if the GMAC software provides experimental questions just like the real GMAT exam. Theoretically, even if the scoring algorithm is the "same" these strategies wouldn't hold a lot of weight come test time, as you could be guessing/skipping questions which are experimental and thus do not count towards your score and vise versa.
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I'm not sure what "strategies" you're deriving from posts in this thread, but if they're based on when in the test you find a question, the results of the experiments posted here could lead you to make some incorrect conclusions. It's not true that question #5 has a certain "weight" and question #10 has a different "weight". The weighting of questions is based on how difficult each question is, and the difficulty level of question #5 and question #10 will usually be very different from one test to the next. The best strategy on the GMAT is to answer the questions you can answer, and don't use up a lot of time if you can't see how to get to an answer.

There aren't very many experimental questions on the GMAT any more, incidentally - there are only 3 in the Quant section, for example -- so whether the software tests mimic their presence or not won't make a huge difference. Experimental questions are inserted in your real test at positions that are determined completely at random just before your section starts, so they show up in different places for everyone.
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 12 Aug 2019, 11:31
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Assuming that my incorrect answers are evenly distributed and the difficulty level is at normal level as same as other test-takers, are my estimated scores below correct?

Quant: Incorrect answers : Score
0-1 : 51
2-5 : 50
6-10: 49

Verbal: Incorrect answers : Score
6 : 42
8 : 40
10 : 38
12 : 35

In short, to get a 700+ (Q50, V36) I need to maintain maximum 5 incorrect in Quant and 10 incorrect in Verbal?

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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios 12 Aug 2019, 17:44
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Assuming that my incorrect answers are evenly distributed and the difficulty level is at normal level as same as other test-takers, are my estimated scores below correct?

Quant: Incorrect answers : Score
0-1 : 51
2-5 : 50
6-10: 49
Show more

No, it will depend entirely on how hard the questions on your test are, overall. I've seen people get Q50s on GMATPrep tests (the 37 question tests) with 13 wrong answers, for example - that can happen when the question bank is full of very hard questions. Then a test taker can get a lot of Q51-level questions wrong, but everything else right, and still get a Q50. But when the question bank is full of mostly easy or medium level questions, which can be true for some of the tests that have a small question database (this seems to be true in some Exam Pack tests), then each wrong answer is much more consequential. For those tests, your table might be fairly accurate. On the real test, it should normally be true that the question bank is large enough that the test can deliver many hard questions, so you should have a lot more latitude to get wrong answers, if you're aiming for a Q50, than your table would suggest, provided those wrong answers are only on the hardest questions. In fact, I think if you only made 5 mistakes (or fewer), you'd be almost guaranteed to get a Q50, but you should also be able to get a Q50 with many more wrong answers than that.

There's a much more predictable correspondence between number of wrong answers and Verbal scores at the top extreme of the scoring scale, though once you get below perhaps the V41 level or so, I don't think you'll find a very strong correlation (until you get down near the bottom of the scale). What's going to then matter is the difficulty level of a test taker's right and wrong answers, and not the sheer number of right and wrong answers.
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Importance of the First 10 Questions - GMAT Prep What If Scenarios Updated on: 12 Aug 2019, 23:47
Originally posted by mcelroytutoring on 12 Aug 2019, 21:28.
Last edited by mcelroytutoring on 12 Aug 2019, 23:47, edited 3 times in total.
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fudetra
Assuming that my incorrect answers are evenly distributed and the difficulty level is at normal level as same as other test-takers, are my estimated scores below correct?

Quant: Incorrect answers : Score
0-1 : 51
2-5 : 50
6-10: 49

Verbal: Incorrect answers : Score
6 : 42
8 : 40
10 : 38
12 : 35

In short, to get a 700+ (Q50, V36) I need to maintain maximum 5 incorrect in Quant and 10 incorrect in Verbal?
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Here are some estimates based on the hundreds of student ESRs from actual GMATs (not the GMATPrep software, which has a much different scoring algorithm) that I've seen thus far.

VERBAL (30 counted questions per test)

51 = 0 wrong
48 = 1 wrong
47 = 2 or 3 wrong
46 = 3 wrong
42 = 5 wrong
40 = 7-10 wrong
35 = as few as 8 wrong or as many as 12 wrong, depending on where you get them wrong (see below)
etc.

QUANT (28 counted questions per test)

0-2 wrong: 51 (96%)
1-6 wrong: 50 (86%)
4-7 wrong: 49 (75%)
5-8 wrong: 48 (69%)
6-9 wrong: 47 (63%)
6-10 wrong: 46 (60%)
7-11 wrong: 45 (57%)
7-12 wrong: 44 (52%)
etc.

Sources: here and here and here and here

-Brian
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