Variations between MGMAT and Actual GMAT....what to expect ?

[aurag8399]

Hi

I've been taking MGMAT CATS for the the last 10 days. I have taken 5 CATs till date, besides taking GMATprep tests.

Till today my scores were consistent, ranging form 710-730 in MGMATs and 730 in GMAT prep.
But, today when i took 5th MGMAT test i scored 760 (Q 49 and V 45).
Is there, some sort of difference between the difficulty level of 5th MGMAT CAT and other tests.
I've got my GMAT tomorrow (20th of Aug 2011) and don't know whether to feel confident about 5th CAT test result ?
Pl guide

[StaceyKoprince]

STOP! Stop taking a bunch of CATs all in a row. You're wasting your CATs!! There aren't that many good CATs out there - don't waste them. (I know you posted this just one day before your test, which was a couple of days ago now, but I'm going to post this for the benefit of anyone else in the same situation!)

CAT exams are really good for (a) figuring out where you're scoring right now, (b) practicing stamina, and (c) analyzing your strengths and weaknesses. The actual act of just taking the exam is NOT so useful for improving. It's what you do with the test results / between tests that helps you to improve.

At the MOST frequent, take a CAT once a week, and that's ONLY when you're at the end of your study and reviewing - for the last several weeks before the exam. Before that, only once every 2 to 4 weeks!

Here's the other reason why (besides the fact that you don't really get *better* by taking CATs this way): these tests are all pulling from the same database of questions. If you are taking the tests very closely together, you're consistently pulling from the same "level" of the database every time, because you're not actually getting better in between tests. The database isn't designed to have 6 tests' worth of questions all at the same level - the idea is that you're supposed to be getting better over time.

So what happens is this: you run out of questions at certain levels. When that happens, the database can't give you questions you've already seen, so it gives you other questions outside of the desired range. And since you're already scoring at a high level / using up the hard questions, that means you're going to get easier questions. So now your score is going to kick up because you're going to get more questions right than you should really be getting right.

In other words, no, you probably didn't actually earn a 760 on that last test. The 710 to 730 range is your true range (that assumes that you did take those other tests under as close to official conditions as possible - if you skipped the essays, used the pause button, took longer breaks than allowed, etc, then your scores might have been artificially inflated).

Okay, so I hope things did go well for you on test day. Let us know if you have any other questions (or just let us know how it went!).