Scoring Question

[jocelynalt7]

Hi Stacey,

I listened to Ron's tutorial on timing from August 5th and found it immensely helpful.

I have a specific question I'm wondering if you can shed light on with relation to timing and strategy and their relation to scores.

Is there any guidance you can give on the number of problems it's possible to quit on and/or get wrong and still get scores within specific ranges (710, 750, 770) for example? I'm still confused about how that works on an adaptive test. Put another way, can you get 10 or 12 wrong and still get really high scores on the Quant section of the GMAT?

Thank you!

[StaceyKoprince]

I can't talk about # wrong within specific 3-digit score ranges for 2 reasons:

(1) the 3-digit scores are a combination of quant and verbal performance; we have to talk about performance in only one section

(2) even within one section, there is no rule about how many wrong gets you a certain score

We CAN talk about certain ranges of # wrong, but the score on this test is not based primarily on the percentage correct. (Though obviously that can affect things - if you get everything wrong, you're not going to get a good score!)

For most people scoring up to about the 80th percentile in a section, you answer about 40% of the questions wrong in that section. As scores go above 80th percentile, people get fewer questions wrong, but you are still getting a higher percentage of questions wrong than you might expect for those kinds of scores. Someone scoring in the 90th percentile in a section might still be getting 15 or 20% of the questions wrong.

The nutshell: yes, you can get 10 to 12 questions wrong and still get quite a good score. Assuming, of course, that the 10 to 12 you get wrong are VERY highly rated questions. :)

Also, expect to get some questions wrong. Expect to get more wrong than you're used to when you do well on a (paper-based) test. Don't let that freak you out - otherwise, that might harm your performance later in the section!