Discrepancy in CAT results by different companies

[charroyal]

Hello fellow GMATers,

I started working towards my GMAT in mid April 2012. I signed up to a GMAT prep class and I chose Kaplan. I have finished their 9 class course a couple of weeks ago, which was useful.

However, I haven't seen any improvement in the scores from the day I took my diagnostic test. I am considering getting another course by another company, so I started browsing around and saw that Kaplan's scores are normally lower than the actual GMAT scores. I have constantly seen people do better when taking MGMAT or Princeton tests than Kaplan's so I would like to ask to those who took any Kaplan CATs what you think about their scoring algorythm. Is it accurate enough? Have you also seen lower scores in Kaplan? Would you say that MGMAT is best at reflecting a comparable score with the actual GMAT?

It would be great help when deciding how to solve the situation!
Thanks very much!!

[StaceyKoprince]

Great question - but this is probably not the best folder in which to ask. (Though, anybody reading, please give charroyal your opinion if you have one!)

The reason I say this is not the best folder is that this is a folder specifically designed for teachers (er, me) to give advice to students, and you seem to be looking for advice from fellow students. I'd post in one of the student folders and also ask your same question on another site that's more focused on student-to-student interactions, such as Beat the GMAT.

I haven't taken any of Kaplan's practice tests. I have heard anecdotally from students that the scores tend to be lower, BUT we have to be really careful about drawing conclusions from random posts on a forum. "Like-minded" people tend to find each other online, so you'll have a cluster of people all talking about how Kaplan's CAT scores are lower... but that might not actually be true across the full population of Kaplan CAT test takers.