Mock Accuracy

[aishwaryam677]

I just finished giving a free CAT available online. I got 12 questions wrong in verbal and my score was just 29, which was quite disappointing. I did not get a lot of questions wrong and neither were they consecutive. Can you tell me how these adaptive tests work?

[StaceyKoprince]

I can tell you how our test works (and the real test). But what you've described is unusual - that wasn't one of our tests, was it?

Most scores correspond to approximately 60% correct / 40% incorrect. You answered 12/41 incorrectly, or about 30%. If the incorrect answers are very spread out, then I would not expect a score of 29.

It's possible to really hurt your score if the wrong answers are clustered together, but you said this was not the case. I just want to make sure. You could hurt your score a lot by having, for example, 2 wrong, 1 right, 2 wrong, 1 right, 2 wrong. That's 6 wrong out of a string of 8 and that would definitely drop someone's score, even though you had no more than 2 wrong in a row. Did something like that happen? (When you say the wrong answers were not consecutive, I don't know whether you mean all 12 were not consecutive--ie, 12 in a row-- or no 2 answers were consecutive, or something else.)

But if something like that didn't happen, then I'm a bit puzzled.