How is this possible?

[rdaniel95]

I took a GMATPrep practice test today and scored a 740. Seems a bit off because I did not finish the quant section and had to start filling in bubbles (and missed 16/37). Somehow I was awarded a 47 quant and a 42 verbal.

Does this seem right?

[StaceyKoprince]

Everybody misses a lot of questions, so missing 16 out of 37 is pretty typical for a score of 47 (which is in the 70s, percentilewise). Depending upon how many questions in a row you had to guess, you may have gotten a bit lucky and gotten a few right randomly, because it is unusual to have to guess on a lot at the end and still get a good score. (If you only had to guess on 2-3, the penalty would be decent but not huge if you got them all wrong; if you had to guess on 4+, the penalty would be pretty big if you got them all wrong.)

You did much better on the verbal, where a 42 is in the 90s, percentilewise. And that's a big reason why you had such a high score - the verbal is weighted a bit more heavily than the quant.

The real lesson here, though: this test is not scored the way you are used to tests being scored. Unless you are scoring in the 90s (percentile) in a section, you are going to get MANY questions wrong (and you're even going to get a lot more than "normal" wrong when scoring in the 90s - "normal" being paper-and-pencil-school-test normal).

[rdaniel95]

Wow. Didn't know the scoring system worked that way. With such a high miss rate, I didn't think that I would score that well. Of the 16 I missed, 13 were due to the guesses I made at the end. Clearly need to improve my timing.

[StaceyKoprince]

yeah, that's good to know, huh? The other thing you should know is that the per-question penalty for a missed question increases if you have multiple questions wrong in a row, topping out at around 2 to 2.5 percentile points per question for 5+ missed questions in a row. So your big task is not to minimize what you get wrong - you're going to get a lot wrong - but to minimize getting a lot of questions wrong in a row.

So, yes, you need to fix that timing. :)