Wide variation in test scores between Manhattan Prep Tests and GMAC

Hi Ashish,

Thank you for pointing that out! I was not aware of that at all. I'll reconsider my options with SC.

Thanks!

Hi Andrew,

Thank you so, so much for sharing this! I just know this is going to be the anchor for my SC preparations. Y'all are awesome!

Best,
Vishisht.

Do official questions only, but avoid questions from the GMATPREP tests.
Do questions from recent Official Guides, Verbal Reviews and Quant Reviews.

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While Manhattan Prep should show conservative scores, many prep providers tend to use the same or a variation of official mocks. So, as others have pointed out, the official mock should feel more familiar to you, thus the higher score. At this point I would take the actual exam sooner than later to see a real score.

The discrepancies here are actually something I very commonly encounter with my students. Generally, such a gap between GMAC Quant scores and Manhattan Prep scores can be attributable to discrepancies between your skill set and the skill set that the exam you're taking rewards.

Manhattan Prep exams generally reward mathematically-intensive, algebraic solutions, so if you have any gaps there, they'll be magnified on those exams and will subsequently lead to a lower score. On the other hand, GMAC questions are designed to test your reasoning skills and are crafted in a much more deliberate and nuanced way to ensure that they are indeed measuring what they intend to measure. The major consequence of this fact is that you can often strategically reason through questions on official GMAC questions in a way that you can't on Manhattan exams. Ultimately, your goal is to master the GMAT, not Manhattan Prep's curriculum, so you should be comforted by your Quant performance on the GMAC exams: these scores better represent your skillset and should be more in line with what you score on the real thing. That said, identifying potential conceptual gaps based off of your Manhattan Prep performance would probably be worthwhile, just make sure that you don't get so lost in the weeds on concepts that you forget to look at the big picture.

Hello!
Coming back to this - the question contain 24 questions to be completed in 45 minutes. On exceeding the time limit, the test doesn't end, but the "scoring" stops. The report at the end gives a range of possible scores and a quick overview of "expect success" with different question types (the question types are very broad buckets). An important thing to note here is that they have declared that the scoring algorithm is different from the actual GMAT exam.

Hello!

Thank you so much for your insights with this. I wasn't able to get to this before, but now that I look back on the official questions and mocks I've attempted over the last few months, and even in my official attempt today, the quant emphasis was definitely more on reasoning rather than pure math. The whole thing makes a lot more sense now!