GMAT Club Free Test Scoring

Question

Hi, I was wondering if anyone knows how reliable the free GMAT Club practice exam is. I took the official practice exam yesterday and scored 585 (65th), today i did the gmat club practice and scored 655 (91st). When i looked at the stats, questions would switch from hard to easy (for quant) even though i was answering them correctly, is this a possible way of how the actual GMAT algorithm works? As for the verbal, there was a high number of easy questions, and for data insight, most questions were labeled as hard, so i have trouble recognizing how the selection of the difficulty for the questions is made. I’m just wondering if anyone knows how to explain the discrepancy between my two scores, and whether the Gmat club algorithm is somewhat similar to the official one?

bb · Answer

antonhoosegow ,

Hm.... that’s a big jump. It looks suspicious. The free test has a limited database that has enough questions for about 1.5 tests and as the result the accuracy is much less precise than a real full test. If you are up for it, I have given you a 2-day Full Subscription to GMAT Club Tests Pro to see how your score will be with a real adaptive test with a full question bank. I would be curious if you are up to take one more test 😇 (usually our full tests are very close in scoring)

FYI - it is like that on the GMAT prep and on the real GMAT. Question difficulty jumps around because there are different question types - e.g. Probability or Roots and traditionally the Probability questions are Harder than Roots questions, so if you are doing really well, you will get an easy-ish Roots question even if you are knocking things out of the way. Similarly if you are not doing well, you will still get a harder Probability question (maybe) even if you are failing.

antonhoosegow · Answer

Thank you for the reply! I understand better how it works now. Thank you so much for the access, I will definitely attempt the other tests!!

AjiteshArun · Answer

Hi antonhoosegow,

You should generally think about difficulty as moving up (or down) gradually, with bigger jumps at the beginning of a section. That could change if we get many questions wrong in a row though. It's also better to think about average difficulty.

The ESR for the old GMAT included some basic information about difficulty, but unfortunately, the new ESR doesn't give us any such information.

bb · Answer

Thank you. 
PS. I think the user’s comment was directed towards GMAT Club tests which do display difficulty.... And made me wonder if we should increase the question bank size for the free test 😬

AjiteshArun · Answer

I understand. That's why I tried to address only the "actual GMAT algorithm" bit.

Another interesting point about the old GMAT is that GMAC ran some short knowledge certification (I don't remember the full name) programs in which they went through GMAT exam design and scoring with a few (5-6) instructors. That was very useful, and I wonder if they'll do that again for the new GMAT.

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