Run out of 700-800 level questions by 4th CAT?

[zubin.desai]

Hi, I had heard some people say that if you are doing well on the CATs, the MGMAT question banks run out of 700-800 level problems by the 6th CAT. I just took the 4th CAT and got my highest score yet. However, on verbal, my last 8 questions were 600-700 level, and I got 7 of the 8 correct. I ended up doing great on verbal, V42 96th percentile. However I am wondering whether this score is inflated because I ran out of harder questions. Shouldn't I have been seeing some 700-800 level in the last 8 problems? Or is this part of the algorithm?

A little confused here, I am happy my score went up but now I am wondering whether it is artificially inflated and whether I won't be getting harder-level problems in the next CAT. Thanks!

-Zubin

[StaceyKoprince]

Hmm. That doesn't sound good, but it's rare to run out by the 4th test unless you were scoring in the 90th+ percentile from the very first test, and it doesn't sound like that was the case. There are some quirks of the way the algorithm works that could allow what you described, but we should check into this further.

Send an email to techsupport@manhattangmat.com with your name (whatever name is on your client account), contact info, and the info you told me above. Tell them that I suggested you do this so that we could check into the data to see what's going on.

[zubin.desai]

Hi Stacey, my first 4 verbal percentiles are all pretty close to 90%.

CAT 1: 91%
CAT 2: 89%
CAT 3: 89%
CAT 4: 96%

Do you think I should still contact tech support or does that fact I ran out of 700-800 problems on the 4th CAT make sense given the above percentiles?

Thanks!

[StaceyKoprince]

Ah, okay - that does make more sense then.

So, yes, it is likely that your score is somewhat inflated, but you were already scoring in the 90th percentile, so it's not that inflated. Also, it doesn't sound like you ran out of questions until towards the end of the 4th test, so again, it wouldn't be that inflated - maybe a few percentile points.

Going forward, you may want to use GMATPrep when you want to take a full test and get an accurate picture of your score. If you're still working on your quant, you can use the quant portions of your remaining MGMAT tests as "mini-CAT" practices for quant only. Generally, keep your skills up on verbal unti you get the quant where you want it, and then get in there and take the test! :)