EMPOWERgmatRichC wrote:
The scoring algorithm on the Official GMAT is far more complicated than most people realize
Since that algorithm is proprietary, no GMAT company has an exact match for it, thus CAT scores can vary a bit based on the 'biases' involved in their respective designs.
This is not true. The GMAT scoring algorithm is simpler than most people claim - it's just based on probability theory, nothing more. I won't speculate about why so many people want to make it out to be something mysterious. And the GMAT scoring algorithm is in the main not proprietary (beyond some unimportant details); it is based on Item Response Theory principles that have been published in countless academic papers.
drkuster - you should only trust scores from official practice tests. I'd just ignore any scores you get from prep company tests, regardless of the company. It's true that no company models the official scoring algorithm correctly, but that's only one reason company test scores are untrustworthy. Company tests use company-written questions. Those questions will generally overemphasize certain skills that aren't that important on the real GMAT, and underemphasize other skills that are important on the real test. So some people will do better on company tests than on the real thing, and others will do worse, and this will vary from person to person and from company to company. That issue is especially pronounced in Verbal; many company questions posted to this forum either have no right answer or two right answers, and if a test includes flawed questions, that test cannot produce meaningful scores.
You're starting from a strong baseline - your Verbal score is especially good (Quant scores tend to be a lot higher than Verbal scores, so even if it might not seem that way, you're starting from a much higher Verbal level). That's a great place to be, because it's much easier to improve at Quant through study. So I'd suggest devoting more time to Quant than to Verbal, since that time allocation will be most rewarding. In general, you should be primarily using official questions for practice, and official tests when you need an accurate score assessment. There isn't much reason to assess your score again though until you've reviewed everything, so I wouldn't suggest attempting another test soon. Unfortunately official sources don't explain things very well, so you'll want other resources that explain concepts and theory - make sure you find a resource that explains things clearly, in a way that you understand. Often the explanations tutors post to this forum are more useful than those in the official books as well, so that's one way to take advantage of gmatclub. Good luck!
_________________
http://www.ianstewartgmat.com