Analyzing Your GMAT Enhanced Score Report (Part 2)
Last time, we talked about how to analyze the overall exam data of your Enhanced Score Report, as well as the data for the IR and Essay sections. Now, it’s time to dive into the Verbal section data.
First, the report will tell you your Sub-Section Rankings—your percentile rankings by question type (Critical Reasoning, Reading Comprehension, Sentence Correction). This is extremely useful because you can tell whether you are significantly stronger in certain areas.
If the rankings are within about 10-15 percentile points, I’d consider that statistical “noise.” For example, if CR is 60th percentile and RC is 50th percentile, I don’t think there’s a hugely significant difference in your performance on those two question types. Why? There are too many other variables that go into this data. Standardized tests are not perfectly precise; they have standard deviations for a reason.
For example, the test is adapting to you as you go, so you may happen to get harder RCs than CRs, on average. If so, you’re likely to get more RCs wrong—and that may pull down your percentile ranking (depending on how the rankings are calculated for this report). Alternatively, you may happen to get a higher proportion of questions in your areas of weakness for one question type; that would also pull down your percentile ranking for that type.
Here’s the beginning of the Verbal data for my 710 exam:
The Score text in blue is something that I added to the image—I looked these up on the mba.com page that shows all the GMAT percentile rankings for scores.
I need to marry that data with my timing data in order to interpret this. In the report, just after the above rankings chart, another chart shows that I averaged 1:25 on CR, 1:14 on RC, and 1:39 on SC.
How do you think I should interpret the percentile and timing information together?
No really, think about it before you keep reading.
La la la. Don’t look below yet.
Okay, here’s what I think. I spent extra time on SC (we’re supposed to average about 1:20), so that matches up with me doing so well on those. And I was going faster than average on CR, as well (1:25 vs. the standard average of 2:00). So this reinforces the idea that I’m probably about equal in SC and CR.
But I was going really fast on RC. That 1:14 includes my reading time! It looks like I was rushing RC, and rushing usually leads to careless mistakes—so maybe my RC isn’t as bad as it looks from the percentile ranking. I might do better if I stop rushing things.
If both CR and SC had been longer than average, or if one had been much longer than average, then I’d need to figure out what trade-offs are worth my time. It may be the case that I want to do exactly what I did and I’m willing to sacrifice RC—maybe I already know that RC is the worst question type for me.
But if I’m doing this unconsciously, then there’s a good chance that I’m sacrificing something that would be easier to get right. (On quant, in particular, I see this pattern all the time: People spend more time on Problem Solving and sacrifice Data Sufficiency as a result—when they could actually do better on DS than PS if they spent normal time on DS.)
GMAT Enhanced Score Report: Verbal Performance by Fundamental Skills
This section shows your percentage correct for each question type across two sub-categories for that type:
- CR: Analysis / Critique and Construction / Plan
- RC: Identify Inferred Idea and Identify Stated Idea
- SC: Grammar and Communication
I don’t find this section super useful on verbal. The two buckets are so broad that I don’t quite know what to do with them unless someone scores 100% in one and 0% in the other. (And, even there, I’m only sure what to do on RC and somewhat in SC.)
The ESR has a FAQ section explaining each category (click on the FAQ tab at that link). For RC, the distinction seems pretty clear: inference vs. stuff that was explicitly stated in the passage.
For SC, I’m pretty sure that the two categories are, broadly speaking, grammar and meaning. That’s a good split—but it’s also true that sometimes the line is fuzzy (you can call the same thing a grammar issue or meaning issue). Since I don’t know exactly where they draw the line, I’m not 100% sure how to act on this data.
For CR, the descriptions are a little too general—I feel like I’m doing what they describe on every CR problem. So I just ignore that one entirely and move to the next set of (very useful!) data points.
GMAT Enhanced Score Report: Performance Progression
Before I tell you what I think, examine the data below and figure out what you think. There are three charts: Percent Correct, Average Difficulty, and Time Management, each by quadrant (or quarter) of the section.
Thoughts?
(You might have noticed that this isn’t from my test. My data wasn’t very useful for this particular analysis because I wasn’t taking the test normally.)
First, I have to give a caveat: Each chart shows four data points, representing approximately one quarter of the test, but the exam is question-adaptive (that is, it adapts after every question you answer), so it’s a challenge to interpret this data. I understand why GMAC doesn’t give us more granular data (it would give away too much information about how the algorithm works)—but we do have to be careful with how we analyze this.
Second, both for that reason and because this is an adaptive test, it’s crucial to analyze this data all together. Any one chart in isolation doesn’t tell you that much.
Finally, let’s call this test-taker Zee.
The test starts you somewhere in the medium range. Since Zee scored a 37 on Verbal, the test started at a lower level than Zee’s level—so for the first quadrant of the test, Zee’s score went up. You can see that by combining the first two charts—Zee had a good percentage correct and the average difficulty increased from quadrant 1 to 2. Zee even accomplished this while staying just under the average time. Most of the time, my student’s ESRs will show extra time spent during one or more of the earlier quadrants (remember that for later).
The percent correct for the second quadrant was still on the higher side, but the average difficulty dipped in the third quadrant. So it’s likely that somewhere in the second quadrant (probably later in the quadrant), Zee started struggling more (as everyone does on this test, since it’s adaptive). This is where the limitation of having only 4 data points comes in…we have to guess when stuff happened.
And then Zee hit a wall in the third quadrant. And look at the time management pie for the third quadrant—on average Zee was spending a lot more time on the incorrect problems. So basically, Zee started getting really hard problems and tossing a lot of time at them. Not surprisingly, Zee got these really hard problems wrong anyway—and then had to rush on others to get back on time. (If Zee were my student, I’d be recommending our Yellow Pad time management technique right about now.)
Sometimes Zee got some of those really-fast problems right, but there may have been some careless mistakes in there as well contributing to that 57% incorrect in quadrant 3. It looks like Zee might have dropped down even further than Zee is really capable of scoring, because that fourth quadrant was really good—almost everything right and the difficulty increased again. I wonder whether Zee could have lifted even further but just ran out of problems / room to improve (because the section ended).
So there’s an opportunity here for Zee to learn how to identify really hard problems and let them go faster. Zee can then use that time on other problems that Zee has a better chance to answer correctly. If so, then Zee’s score won’t drop as much in the third quadrant, and Zee will be able to lift the score even further by the end of the section.
Speaking of the end of the section: The GMAT is a Where You End Is What You Get test—so if you tank the fourth quadrant because you’re running out of time (or for any reason!), your score is going to drop and then…that’s it. That’s your score.
Remember when I said that I’ll usually see a similar trajectory to Zee’s at the start, but with a higher average time for the first quadrant or two? When that happens, the test-taker has to make up that time somewhere else—and that somewhere else is usually the fourth quadrant. The ESR will show a really fast average time and a really low percent correct for quadrant 4—basically, your score is tanking in the fourth quadrant because you’re running out of time. And Where You End Is What You Get.
If you analyze these three charts together, you can get a sense of your scoring trajectory through the section—and this is super valuable for your retake. If you haven’t (yet!) gotten the score you wanted, then it’s almost certainly the case that you need to get better at how you take the test. That includes decisions that you make about when and how to spend your time and mental energy in order to put yourself in the best position to finish the section strongly.
One more thing: When people hear that the GMAT is a Where You End Is What You Get test, they ask whether they should purposely just guess really quickly for the first third of the exam and then spend all of their time on the final two-thirds. You don’t want to do that either—that’s the equivalent of having the test start you at 0 instead of halfway up the difficulty axis, so now you have a lot further to lift (and you only have two-thirds of the questions left to help you lift).
What you really want is a steady trajectory across the whole section. If you’re doing well, you will earn really hard questions—ones that are too hard for you. You want that to happen! And then you want to recognize that they’re too hard and let go—that is, you want to maximize your ROI on this exam.
Join us next time, when we’ll talk about how to analyze the Quant data from your ESR.
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Stacey Koprince is a Manhattan Prep instructor based in Montreal, Canada and Los Angeles, California. Stacey has been teaching the GMAT, GRE, and LSAT for more than 15 years and is one of the most well-known instructors in the industry. Stacey loves to teach and is absolutely fascinated by standardized tests. Check out Stacey’s upcoming GMAT courses here.