Scored 720 on GMAT. Penalty of leaving 1 Q unanswered.

[smitatosh]

Hi,

I took my GMAT recently and scored 720(Q49 and V39). I ran out of time on Verbal Section and to my horror left the last Q unanswered. I had read in plenty of places that GMAT penalizes you heavily for unanswered Questions, and I still cannot believe myself that I left 1 Q unanswered. I have never done that even on practice tests. What is done is done. I do not intend to take the GMAT again. I just wanted to know (for my own satisfaction), that my score was not affected too much due to the last unanswered Q (maybe I can live with it if it is just 10-15 points).

[StaceyKoprince]

Did you have an answer in but failed to hit next and confirm? If so, then the test still accepted whatever you put in - so you didn't leave it blank. :)

The only stat we know for sure is that leaving 5 questions blank when scoring in the 70th percentile results in a 15 percentile point penalty. That averages to 3 percentile points per, so possibly it was around 3 percentile points, although we don't know whether the penalty is linear... so possibly there isn't as much of a penalty for leaving only one blank, or possibly the biggest drop comes after the first one.

Also, generally speaking, it has been reported that the higher the scoring level, the more penalty there is for leaving something blank - though, again, we don't know how much.

You scored in the 87th percentile on verbal, so my guess is that the question might have cost you between 3 and 5 percentile points. That might have put you at a 40 or 41 on Verbal, which may or may not have changed your overall score - it seems right now Q49 V40 would have kept you at 720 and Q49 V41 would have added 10 points (730). (I just did a search online for score combinations reported by students within the last 2 months.)

So, either it wouldn't have mattered or you might've had 10 more points, which isn't much of a change. Don't stress about it.

Nice work, by the way!!