Leaving questions unanswered

by **lliddar** Tue Jul 17, 2007 6:36 pm

Is there a way to estimate the impact to your score if questions are left unanswered? I finished a recent MGMAT pract test but ran out of time (w/o realizing it) on Verbal... my last question answered was #39. Is there a translation for each quest left to a raw score decrease? ie, 2 questions unanswered takes a raw score from 45 to 42??

by **StaceyKoprince** Tue Jul 17, 2007 6:48 pm

There isn't a direct translation because it depends on the scoring level and the number of questions left blank. Roughly, though, the impact is pretty steep and you definitely don't want to be in that situation on the real test. The thing you (and others) are doing wrong is spending too much time on questions earlier on the test (and then likely getting those "too long" questions wrong anyway).

The test will give you things you cannot do, no matter how good you get - there's absolutely no way to get around that. So your task is to identify them before you have spent too much time on them, make an educated guess and move on. That gives you the time to finish all of the questions.

by **qa3405** Sat Aug 04, 2007 6:42 pm

Stacey or any mod ... I left one unanswered and wondered this same thing. When you say steep ...can you give a ballpark number? 2pts 5 pts etc
I definitely wont do this on the real test!

by **StaceyKoprince** Tue Aug 07, 2007 1:13 pm

One question won't have a huge impact (though it will have some negative impact obviously), but I really can't even give a ballpark because it's not a linear scale (the more you get wrong, the more negative the impact becomes) nor is it consistent (it's different at different scoring levels).

Suffice to say that one question will have a slight effect, 4 will have a noticeable impact, and 8+ will cost you so many percentile points that you will be seriously unhappy with your score.