GMATPrep- continuation of what if scenarios(changing perhaps?)

Question

Disclaimer  : The thread related to Gmat prep scenarios has grown very long, hence thought of posting my results and questions in a new thread. Please merge if needed.

Just finished exam 2 of exam pack and got a 730 ( Q 50, V 39). Number of mistakes and position of mistakes as below.

Quant : 5 mistakes at questions 15,18,23,30,35.
Verbal : 9 mistakes at questions 4,14,15,16,29,33,37,40,41

Understandably the continuous verbal mistakes at 14,15,16 should have been avoided.
 However, The question that I have have for experts is on the quant section; how to get a 51 ? I know getting all questions correct might, but that is undeniably a exceedingly challenging task. To be more specific, how many question does one need to answer correctly to get a 51 in quant? based on other analysis and researches of the software?

Any help will be appreciated.

BmoreNerd · Answer

I'm interested to hear opinions on this as well. Spacing of wrong answers is extremely important. I will be taking the GMAT on Dec 30th and recently took a GMATPrep exam. Ended up with 7 questions wrong on Quant, relatively evenly spaced including one of the first 10 incorrect (#5). Only had 4 questions wrong on verbal and was shocked to see 750 (49Q 42V) split. Lowest score I've ever had on verbal. Closer examination showed that the first question was wrong on verbal. The other 3 errors were evenly spaced throughout the test. The moral of the story is this: do NOT get the first question wrong on either section. It can be disastrous.

dabral · Answer

The relationship between the number of incorrect questions and getting a Q51 depends on the average difficulty of that particular administration of the GMAT. You see this difference in Exam 3 and Exam 4 of the Exam Pack 1. Exam 3 on average throws a lot harder questions than Exam 4, which means you can miss more questions on Exam 3 to get the same score compared to Exam 4. Also, in the free GMATPrep one could miss 6 questions and still get a Q51. However, the 6 you miss have to be all difficult questions, if you miss a bunch of easy ones and you still miss a total of 6, then you may not get a Q51. The difficulty level of the questions you miss is also an important determinant of whether you get a Q51 or not.

As far as not missing a bunch of questions in a row, that is difficult to control. It is not like in the exam I can tell myself that I cannot miss the next four questions, of course I am trying to get everything right. I don't know if there is anything specific that can be done to avoid that.

Ultimately it boils down to performing at a high level, where you are for sure not missing any of the easy and medium questions, and taking on most of the hard ones and missing a few here and there. I pay close attention to the easy and medium ones because I am more likely to miss those because of having my guard down. I might even double check my work to be absolutely certain that I got those questions right. This is pretty much the main strategy I follow.

Cheers,
Dabral

EMPOWERgmatRichC · Answer

Hi avig,

You already seem to understand that the scoring algorithm on the Official GMAT is complicated - there's far more that goes into generating your score than just the number of correct answers. As such, you CANNOT think in those terms. Since a number of your questions in both the Quant and Verbal sections are going to be experimental (meaning that they will NOT count), getting those questions correct or incorrect won't matter (the problem is that you won't know which questions are experimental and which ones count, so you have to do your best on all of them). Instead, take a good look at the questions that you got wrong and think about WHY you got those questions wrong. Was it because of a silly/little mistake or was it because the question was too hard? At your current Quant level, the GMAT becomes really "sensitive" to little mistakes, so you have to be meticulous in your work and keep the silly mistakes from happening.

To take all of this a step further, if you're not sure if a question is too hard or not, then you should post it in the Forums to see if the question was "gettable." In real simple terms, to maximize your score, you have to correctly answer all of the questions that are "gettable." You don't have to get all of the questions correct to score a Q51 either.

As an aside on something BmoreNerd wrote - you CAN get the first question wrong in each section and still score an 800, so you shouldn't be too worried about that. To stay on point though, assuming that the first question was not experimental, it would help your score if you got it correct.

Another factor in all of this is that the GMAC practice CATs draw from a rather limited pool of questions, so there's not as much variation and there's a very real possibility that performing "the exact same way" on Test Day could lead to a different score (within +- 30 points, according to GMAC).

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

pranj123456 · Answer

Interestd to hear expert opinion on this given that I will also be appearing for the GMAT soon!

GmatKnightTutor · Answer

If you're aiming for a very high total or section score, it might be worth checking out some of the publicly shared ESRs to see the types of performances that can get them. The Share GMAT Experience subforum may also help provide a sense how likely/long different score jumps are to achieve.

-contact: gmatknight site | gmatclub dm

-contact: gmatknight site | gmatclub dm

ScottTargetTestPrep · Answer

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