only 1 Q wrong on Quant, yet only a score of 80

Question

I took the GMAT Focus today and came out of the quant section feeling great. however I saw that I only scored an 80. I only got one question wrong - how is this score possible?

Aarushi225 · Answer

What score did you get?

Purnank · Answer

huh? This should be Q85+ atleast.

EducationAisle · Answer

This seems quite unfair. Did you edit and change few responses at the end of the section?

jehangirkhambata · Answer

changed only 1 answer (at the begginging of the test) from Incorrect to Correct!

AjiteshArun · Answer

Wow. I've been following reports like yours for some time now, but this must be the biggest score drop I've seen for 1 mistake till now. Sorry for asking, but you are absolutely sure that your official score report says Q80, right?

This is not a good look for the GMAT.

bb · Answer

Wow!!!! I am sorry. I Will try again to bring it up to GMAC. Ajitesh - You once mentioned you have a great relationship, do you think you can potentially leverage it and get a better answer than what I have been able to get?

Posted from my mobile device

bb · Answer

so I cannot explain nor am I trying to explain why this would happen because I can’t really see how it would happen, But one guess could be if the previous section was scored on the lower side and then this section was full of super easy questions, and maybe be in some remote universe this could be a plausible scenario but it really doesn’t look good 😞

Posted from my mobile device

Posted from my mobile device

jehangirkhambata · Answer

Thank you for the response! As you can imagine i am really disappointed.
is there no way i can "challenge" this score with GMAC?

AjiteshArun · Answer

Hi bb,

I may not have used those exact words (purely professional, so not close/personal). As for individual cases, I've only gotten responses for issues related to test administration (problems at the test centre, for example). I doubt GMAC would get back to me on issues related to a specific test taker's GMAT (privacy, and to guard their own data/info).

I've also been wondering whether GMAC has put some measures in place to stop test takers from abusing the new review and edit feature (for example, a test taker may solve the initial questions, purposely mark the wrong answers, and then come back and change the answers at the end). However,  this is just speculation .

You can (and should) let them know about it. However, I don't think they'll actually change your score.

bb · Answer

Thank you for the feedback and clarification.
I doubt they have tightened the rules around changing answers. I have reviwed a number of papers from mid 80's talking about the section-adaptive tests that allow answer modification (this was last year when GMAC announced plans to release the new test format) and even in the 80's they have ran a number of tests expecting that people would try to lowball by intentionally making mistakes on a 3 or 5 questions and then changing them back but they found that it did not impact the test sufficienly or at all per se. I will need to dig it out out of Google but there was even a name to this tactic if I remember correctly. Anyway, what I am trying to say is that this is not a new thing that popped up and surprised anyone. Or it should not have...

P.S. This is not the article I have read, but this is an interesting one as well - it seems they were messing with the answer change concept since 1929 😂
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5965601/

jehangirkhambata · Answer

Thank you! I only changed a single answer from "incorrect" to "correct". So I didn't try any sneaky tactic to "play the system" per se.

I think I want to try my luck and let them know about it, how can I get in touch with them? I can't find any official contact point

AjiteshArun · Answer

Oh absolutely. I am sure that GMAC wouldn't have been surprised by something like this

I didn't mean that you were doing anything wrong, sorry if it came across like that. I meant only that GMAC may (again, just speculation) have put some measures in place to prevent or reduce the impact of test takers trying to play around with the review feature to get easier questions. You could send them an email using this form .

g1205 · Answer

I also have a quite odd experience with my Quant Results in the real test and the practice tests.

In the real test, I scored 79 in Quant with three questions wrong. I changed question #1 from incorrect to correct later.

In one of the practice exams, I scored 83 in Quant with five questions wrong, including question #1. I changed question #6 from incorrect to correct later.

In my first practice exam, I scored 77 in Quant with seven questions wrong, including the last one unanswered.

I don't know what it is, but I cannot really understand the difference between the quant scores in the practice tests and the real tests, especially because the Verbal and DI scores really make sense when compared between the real test and practice tests.

Dbrunik · Answer

This is very curious to me, as i also got 1 wrong but i secured an 84, (85th percentile). i changed 3 answers from incorrect to correct though, with good time management.

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only 1 Q wrong on Quant, yet only a score of 80

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