CATs vs. real GMAT

[monterrosa]

The CAT Quant questions seem to be much harder than the official guide questions. It looks like you can get 60% right on CATs and still score close to 700...is this analogous to the real GMAT? On the official guide questions I am getting over 80% of them right.

[StaceyKoprince]

The OG guide lists questions all the way from easiest to hardest. On the real test (or any adaptive test), you will not see that kind of spread in difficulty levels. Adaptive tests give you questions that are more closely clustered around your peak ability level (assuming that you aren't making a lot of careless mistakes or something like that).

You can't compare an adaptive test to a static collection of test questions. :)

At the same time, though, there is something to what you noticed on our tests, but for a totally different reason. The real test includes experimental questions - questions that are being tested for future inclusion and dont count toward your score. Experimental questions don't yet have a difficulty level assigned, so you can get extremely easy or next-to-impossible experimentals regardless of your current scoring level.

The higher you score in a certain section, then, the more likely it is that the experimentals you receive will be below your ability level. When that happens, it's like getting a little mental "break" - which you don't get on practice tests because they don't have experimentals.

Finally, yes, even on the real test, you should expect to get a large number of questions wrong. The majority of testers will get about 40% of the questions wrong in a section, though that percentage does change at the higher and lower ends of the scoring range. Even a person scoring in the 90th percentile in a section, though, will get a decent number of questions wrong in that section.