Princeton Review practice test scoring question

Question

I've recently taken 2 PR practice exams on the 2004 CD. The scoring of my results appears very odd to me:

Test 1 - Q:44 V:39, 670 - I got 32/41 correct on verbal, and 28/37 correct on quant. OK - looks reasonable to me.

Test 2 - Q:44 V:39, 670 - I got 35/41 correct on verbal, and 34/37 correct on quant. Hmmm - same exact scores but I feel that I did much better than a 670.

Now, I completely understand that your score is based on when you got the questions wrong (the difficulty level) - but it seems very odd to me that I can improve by 3 questions on verbal and 6 questions on quant and receive the exact same score. My scores also seem very low for how I did on each section. In the quant, I did get one of the first 10 questions wrong, but the other 2 errors were in the last 5-10 questions - yet this is only a 44???

Does anyone have any ideas on how to rationalize these scores, or has anyone noticed any similar weirdness regarding PR scoring?

Thanks!

carlq · Answer

Yah - I realize it's just practice. I suppose what I'm looking for is the answer to a broader question - on the real thing, *roughly* how many questions can I get wrong and still get a score of X. I've never really seen this covered anywhere, and I realize it's impossible to get a precise answer. Assuming one does not get any of the first couple of questions wrong:

- Is it still possible to score 800 if you get any questions wrong? If so, how many?

- I'm targeting 750 - am I looking at making sure I don't get more than 1 wrong in each section? 3 wrong? 5 wrong?

Same thing with a 700 score - anyone have any ideas what would be roughly the worst one could do and still get a 700?

Has anyone who has taken the test have any recollection of how they felt they did and what they ended up with as a score? I know it's tough due to the experimental questions - again, just looking for some rough guidance/information.

I've seen the tables with Q/V scores mapped to the 800 scale - but I haven't seen anything with more of a raw score mapped to Q/V and/or the 800 scale.

Thanks!

Curly05 · Answer

Please come over and help out in math and verbal sections, we need your help:)

bb · Answer

I would not bother too much with PR and Kaplan's scores.

I had something similar with Tests 1 and 2. I got only 2 wrong in Test 1 and my score was not very good. I also noticed that PR used to have tests consisting of the same questions rather than a random pool what PP or Kaplan does. (or so I think?). So, I am not quite sure how CAT-wise it is.

baronharsh · Answer

do not worry too much about your score

use the tests to identify your mistakes and refine your test taking strategy.

go thru the questions you got correct , and the questions where you screwed up.

then correct the basics.

hk

htown · Answer

I would definitely feel a little better, if I knew "roughly" how many one can get wrong and still score above 700.

bb · Answer

Well, why don't you take a PowerPrep and see?

htown · Answer

i don't want to waste a powerprep when i'm not ready. If people have already taken it, maybe they could just post there score along with how many they got wrong in each section. Why do people post there scores? to provide people with a benchmark - this is the same thing, just with the number wrong instead of the actual score.

thanks

Htown

bb · Answer

I appreciate your explanation :lol:

However, from my experience, often people don't keep track of the number of mistakes they have made especially in each section. Also, there are the following concerns: 1. What was the problem's number/difficulty that were messed up - if you have a different position, it is not much use 2. Where were the experimental questions. When you take PP, you will see that you don't get penalized for all mistakes - some of the questions though wrong are still marked as correct becasue they are experimental. So, you can make 10 errors but if 8 of them are experimental, you are pretty well off. I do hope somebody will post a reply with some stats, but it is a slight chance.

carlq · Answer

Yah - obviously the score is dependent on the difficulty level of incorrect answers. But just playing law of averages, if a handful of people were to post how many they got wrong on each section and what their scores were, we'd likely see a good rough estimate.

Here's one thing I've noticed - Based on the scores that people post and the charts I've seen, it appears to me that a combined score of just about 85 (Q+V) is good for a 700, a 95 is good for about 750, and a 100 is good for 800. Since the scoring goes up to 120 (60+60), I'm guessing that there is more than a little room for error on the test. Has anyone scored an 800 on powerprep with mistakes on real questions?

evensflow · Answer

I know a guy who got Q51 and V50 but still got 780 on his GMAT.

bb · Answer

Here is a more or less verified table of GMAT Scores I have been collecting for a whie now. https://www.gmatclub.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?t=1328 (the last document) TO CARLQ: Do you want to post what you have in terms of errors/correct answers? BB

carlq · Answer

BB -
I'm taking the GMAT on Monday morning, so I'm doing both powerprep exams this weekend. I will post my scores and errors after I take them.

You can see my princeton review scores at the top of the thread, and something is clearly awry with their scoring algorithm. I suspect Kaplan is no better so I won't bother with those scores either.

Thanks for that spreadsheet - very helpful.

bb · Answer

Alright man! Good luck for sure, and we'll be waiting for a few scores, and at least one full of pride. :war

P.S. I never got more than 640 on the PR and 620 on Kaplan.

pkatz · Answer

Hey BB, you never scored above 640 on PR and scored how high on actual exam? 
Also I am kind of fed up with the PR exams because I just took a quant section and scored a 44 as well while only missing three questions. I know that one might have a million follow up questions to that, like what were the difficulty of the questions you missed, when did you miss them? etc. My answer is...it's three freakin' questions out of 37, I don't have the attention span to miss less. Who cares when I missed them, or how tough they were. No matter how you space three missed questions, the remaining 34 have the potential to build to an exceptional level of difficulty. How's it my fault that it didn't progressively build to that level? It's like it created a threshold that it would not let me improve beyond (maybe I'm giving them too much credit). Anyway, if anyone out there scored very well on the math section but scored modestly on PR's version could they let me know (might be a confidence booster). If the opposite is true that would be relevant to my inquiry as well.

tzolkin · Answer

I recently took a PR test.

I got 34/37 correct for Math and 32/41 for verbal. 

My final score was : 640 (a 46 Q and only 32 Verbal) 

Can anyone explain this low Verbal ? I only got 1 or 2 wrong in the first 15 Q.

htown · Answer

Im currently scoring consistently around 85% for all problems (a mixture of difficulties) from Kaplan, Princeton and Petersons.

This equates to missing 11 on the actual exam (or 5 on math and 6 on verbal)

Assuming I miss more difficult questions than medium/easy, i would expect that this would be mid to high 600s, which is below my target range.

A friend of mine scored 750 and said he thought you could miss 3-4 in each section. That seems a little generous though.

Thoughts? Should I be worried with 85% (90% math) over 1200 problems (no OG and now CAT tests - these will come later)

Htown

bb · Answer

I got 4 questions wrong on teh PowerPrep (#8, 11, 26 and 27) out of 28 that are REAL and not experimental. I got 49 as my Math score, which is 92 percentile. :wink:

To HTOWN: As you can see from my post, you can actually miss 4 questions and get 49 on math - that was my final score on the REAL GMAT. I have not tried verbal - that's too much time.

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