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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) 13 Dec 2017, 14:07
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mcelroytutoring
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One wrong answer in Verbal usually produces a V49 or V50 score, and would only produce a V48 if the wrong answer were on an easier question (except in unusual circumstances, where the test was unusually easy overall). You can see that just by experimenting with GMATPrep tests, or from the fact that people report getting V49 scores on the real test.
Theoretically, this is true, but after searching GMAT Club (and the rest of the internet) high and low, I see no concrete evidence that scores of V49 or V50 are possible with one counted question wrong. Could you please point me to an ESR that supports this assertion? If you look at my example of the V48 with one wrong ESR posted above, you will notice that the test-taker did not answer a question incorrectly until the final quarter of questions, which suggests that this question was of high difficulty, not low difficulty.
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The first time I took the GMAT I scored V50. Given what my skill level was at the time, it totally makes sense that I would have gotten one wrong. I don't think I got them all right and scored V50.

Meanwhile, somewhat easy questions do show up later in the quant and verbal sections. So, it is conceivable that that person who scored V48 with one wrong missed a relatively easy one.
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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) 13 Dec 2017, 14:39
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If you scored V50 and not V51, then yes, you probably got at least one question wrong. But the question is: was it an experimental question, or one of the 30 counted questions? If the question or questions you got wrong were experimental, then your first attempt on Verbal would potentially match the test-day performance of the OP exactly. (It could also be that the scoring scale has shifted slightly over the years.)

I'm guessing that this V50 test to which you are referring is now over 5 years old, and you don't have an ESR, so we will never know for sure.
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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) 29 Dec 2017, 00:55
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Aw man just almost! J/k. Congratulations on the 790. And thank you for sharing the ESR.

I wonder if anyone has actually contacted the GMAC to ask about the V50 situation. Does anybody have any info?
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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) 02 Jan 2018, 16:05
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mcelroytutoring

Theoretically, this is true, but after searching GMAT Club (and the rest of the internet) high and low, I see no concrete evidence that scores of V49 or V50 are possible with one counted question wrong.
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I don't understand what you think a V49-scoring test taker is doing besides answering one question incorrectly, if you think that with only one incorrect answer you can sometimes get a V48.

And you cannot use the score ranges for incoming MBA classes as any evidence of current scoring practices, since GMAT scores are valid for five years. That one school reports accepting a V51-scorer this year doesn't tell you anything about whether V51 scores are still awarded on the GMAT, only that they were awarded at some point in the past five years.
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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) Updated on: 26 Feb 2018, 10:07
Originally posted by mcelroytutoring on 02 Jan 2018, 19:35.
Last edited by mcelroytutoring on 26 Feb 2018, 10:07, edited 2 times in total.
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IanStewart
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Theoretically, this is true, but after searching GMAT Club (and the rest of the internet) high and low, I see no concrete evidence that scores of V49 or V50 are possible with one counted question wrong.
I don't understand what you think a V49-scoring test taker is doing besides answering one question incorrectly, if you think that with only one incorrect answer you can sometimes get a V48.
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To be clear, I don't "think" that 1 (counted) question wrong can result in a V48 score. We have concrete evidence of that, in the form of an ESR (see below):



As far as a score of V49, I think there are a few possibilities. One is that a score of V49 simply doesn't exist (you might skip directly from 48 to 50, or vice-versa). Another is that you get some experimental questions wrong, but zero counted questions wrong. The final possibility would be that you get 1 counted question wrong--presumably a harder question than the 1 question incorrectly answered by the person who scores a V48. But the fact remains that we don't have any verified V49 or V50 scores with 1 (counted) question wrong anywhere on GMAT Club, so there is no way to know for sure just yet.

Good point about GMAT scores being valid for 5 years--hence, it is true that HBS's class of 2019 admission stats are not necessarily indicative that a V51 is still possible. It could very well be that a V50 is now a perfect score. However, if we take the GMAC website at its word, then a 51V is still possible (see below).

UPDATE 1/4/17: SEE THIS DEBRIEF FOR MORE DISCUSSION OF THE SAME PHENOMENON.

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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) 14 Jan 2018, 18:21
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mcelroytutoring
If you scored V50 and not V51, then yes, you probably got at least one question wrong. But the question is: was it an experimental question, or one of the 30 counted questions? If the question or questions you got wrong were experimental, then your first attempt on Verbal would potentially match the test-day performance of the OP exactly. (It could also be that the scoring scale has shifted slightly over the years.)

I'm guessing that this V50 test to which you are referring is now over 5 years old, and you don't have an ESR, so we will never know for sure.
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I would like to propose a consideration that hasn't been discussed previously. As of July 2017, the test taker can select in which order to take the different sections. Choosing to take Q --> V --> IR --> AWA or V --> Q --> IR --> AWA, as opposed to the original order, may induce the algorithm to apply a "discount" to some verbal questions and thus inhibit the test taker from achieving a perfect score, despite 100% accuracy. Keep in mind that the algorithm compares test takers going back three years, so those that had taken the test prior to the introduction of the order selection weren't as privileged.

This is of course a mere speculation, but it shouldn't be entirely impossible that the algorithm ranks individuals separately based on order selection.
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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) 14 Jan 2018, 20:57
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I doubt that this is the case. GMAC has assured us that in its preliminary studies, the selection of alternate section orders--in other words, allowing students to complete Quant and Verbal first, in either order--has had no effect on the "integrity of GMAT scores." Neither has GMAC suggested in any way that one's chosen section order could somehow affect the scoring of the test.

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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) 22 Feb 2018, 21:33
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Hi all,

GMAC got back to me and my final score is Q51 V51 790!

So that seems to answer a few questions posed:
-yes, a V51 is still possible
-yes, an 800 necessitates 100% of the graded questions be answered correctly at this time
-no, it does not appear that any of the experimental questions impact scoring.

I am curious to know what was changed about the grading algorithm to result in the score change (if all graded verbal questions correct => V=51 ?), but regardless the reason all is right in the GMAT scoring world it seems. Someone linked to another thread where someone got a V50 with 100% correct responses. I'll be happy to inform them if someone doesn't beat me to it.
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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) 23 Feb 2018, 08:19
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justalmost
Hi all,

GMAC got back to me and my final score is Q51 V51 790!

So that seems to answer a few questions posed:
-yes, a V51 is still possible
-yes, an 800 necessitates 100% of the graded questions be answered correctly at this time
-no, it does not appear that any of the experimental questions impact scoring.

I am curious to know what was changed about the grading algorithm to result in the score change (if all graded verbal questions correct => V=51 ?), but regardless the reason all is right in the GMAT scoring world it seems. Someone linked to another thread where someone got a V50 with 100% correct responses. I'll be happy to inform them if someone doesn't beat me to it.
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Congrats on the 51/51, eternaloptimist , and thanks for sharing the news! It took GMAC long enough to change your score, but late is better than never. : ) I like to think that my recent message to GMAC regarding your case might have played a small role.

Given the initial results, I suspect that the experimental questions do in fact still matter to the difficulty curve, but raising your Verbal score to a perfect 51 was the right thing to do, even if it took 3 months for GMAC to finally do so. It's not fair for GMAC to claim that the pretest questions "don't count" if answering 100% of counted questions correctly doesn't yield a perfect V51.

By any chance, did GMAC update your ESR as well?
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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) 02 Sep 2018, 19:44
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Hi justalmost

You mentioned about Veritas question banks. Do you mean the free question banks or those after registering for the Veritas course?

Thanks for your information.

Posted from my mobile device
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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) 08 Jun 2019, 09:06
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A message from Ron................
Attachments

Verbal Score.PNG
Verbal Score.PNG [ 50.37 KiB | Viewed 6600 times ]

Quant Score.PNG
Quant Score.PNG [ 24.41 KiB | Viewed 6603 times ]

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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) 08 Jun 2019, 11:24
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mcelroytutoring

Given the initial results, I suspect that the experimental questions do in fact still matter to the difficulty curve
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They do not. For one, the algorithm needs to know the difficulty level of a question before it can even use your response to that question to compute your score, and the reason a question is being used as an experimental question is because that difficulty level is unknown. So it would be mathematically impossible to use experimental questions in your score calculation. And the fact that experimental questions have no effect on scoring is also confirmed in the official GMAC report discussing how experimental questions are used on the test, so if you want additional confirmation, you could read that report.
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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) 08 Jun 2019, 11:39
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I don't think Ron's description, quoted above, is correct, for the most part. I don't even think it's true that there's disagreement about what makes a Verbal question challenging - if it were true that most questions were somehow roughly equally challenging across the difficulty spectrum (and therefore that most potential SC/CR/RC questions turned out to be unusable on the test), they'd need to include a ton of experimental Verbal questions on each test, to weed out the large proportion of unusable questions. But they've never needed to include a lot more experimental Verbal questions than experimental Quant questions.

What does seem almost certain to be true is that the highest possible difficulty level a Verbal question could have is lower than the highest possible difficulty level a Quant question could have. It's possible to design GMAT-format Quant questions that almost no test taker could answer (without a lucky guess). I don't see how that could be possible in Verbal. So that fact alone means near the top of the scoring scale there will be a greater correlation between 'hit rate' and scaled score in Verbal. But you wouldn't observe that correlation at lower scoring levels, where the test is able to deliver questions both above and below a test taker's level (i.e. at ranges where getting hard questions wrong doesn't hurt you, because the questions are above your level).

And it's also true that the high end of the Verbal scoring scale just has no analog on the Quant scale. In percentile terms, a V40 is like a Q50 roughly. So if you're talking about hit rate in each section, and about how hit rate correlates to Verbal scores in roughly the V40+ range, then to draw a comparison with Quant you'd need to talk about hit rate and Quant scores in the Q50+ range. But there is only one Quant score beyond Q50, whereas there are lots of Verbal scores above Q40. If the Quant scale were capable of differentiating among people at the 97th, 98th, 99th and deep into the 99th percentile, as the Verbal scale does, you'd see a far greater correlation between hit rate and score in the Quant section too at the top end of the scoring scale. You wouldn't see that correlation at all in the middle of the scale, though.

So I wouldn't say the Verbal section is less adaptive than the Quant section at all, if you're talking about the low and middle ends of the spectrum. It's only when you get to the harder questions that it's not able to adapt as successfully, because it's just not possible to create Verbal questions that are as hard as the hardest Quant questions.
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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) 09 Jun 2019, 23:42
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This issue has already been settled--years ago, in fact. You can score Q51 with 0,1, or even 2 questions wrong, but if you answer a single question wrong, then you cannot score a composite 800, even if you score Q51/V51, which is proven by the original poster's verified GMAT score and ESR.
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Q51 V50 790! (Missed 1 DS question) 20 Oct 2020, 03:42
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A ball out of the park! That's what this score is. Congratulations!
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