Q46 with 19 incorrect

Question

Hi there,

I've just finished GMATPrep exam 1 and received Q46 with 19 incorrect answers. Is it possible that my wrong answers being more than the right ones and still I got Q46? I'm a bit confused now.

abhimahna · Answer

Hey Mehemmed ,

Yes, it is perfectly fine to see such scenarios.

Remember the final score doesn't depend on the number of correct or incorrect answers but on the difficulty level of each question.

The more the difficulty level of a question is, the better score you will get if you get that right.

The same thing happened to you in your mock. I am assuming you got many 600-700 level questions correct and may be a few 700 levels.

All the best

Mehemmed · Answer

abhimahna , Thanks for the answer. Yes, scoring algorithm seems a bit weird. I think that's why quant section seemed difficult to me, I didn't expect to get even 40+

BrentGMATPrepNow · Answer

As others have noted, your scores are not based on how many questions you answer correctly; they're based on the  level of difficulty  of the questions you answer correctly/incorrectly.

To illustrate this, I'll share an experiment I performed.

When I was writing an article about the official GMAT software, I took the GMATPrep Practice Test #1 four times, and each time I answered every second question correctly, That is, I purposely answered all of the ODD questions correctly and all of the EVEN questions incorrectly. (I did this for the quant section only)

Given that I correctly answered exactly half of the questions each time, you'd expect my quant scores to be roughly the same for all 4 tests.

My 4 scaled scores were: 19, 23, 26 and 42

This represents a percentile range from approximately 8th percentile to the 63rd percentile.

So, don't worry about how many questions you answered correctly. It has little to do with your score.

Aside : If you're interested, here's a video explaining the GMAT scoring algorithm: 
 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a9kK8b8JS3M

Mehemmed · Answer

GMATPrepNow ,

Thank you for the detailed explanation. I really appreciate that.

ccooley · Answer

Yes, this is completely possible! The short explanation is that your score isn't based on how many you get right. That's a lot to get your head around when you've been taking tests your whole life that are based on the % correct. But the GMAT just doesn't work that way - it's an item-adaptive test, which intentionally ignores the number of questions you get right and wrong.

Here's a much longer explanation of how it actually works, and what this means: https://www.manhattanprep.com/gmat/blog ... mat-quant/

Mehemmed · Answer

Thank you for the answer.

Q46 with 19 incorrect

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