Weird Algorithm or Just a Bad Day?

[tsbassett]

Not sure if this is answerable on a MGMAT forum, but I will give it a shot...

I recently have been trying to improve my verbal score anywhere above my best of a 38. Instead of wasting a MGMAT CAT, I completed a verbal section CAT on the Princeton Review practice GMAT. At the end of the section I got a score of 28 according to the test. I looked at the results and they do not give you any feedback or information on the difficulty levels of the questions so I couldn't tell exactly how I ended back down at a score of 28.

I then looked at my results question by question and still couldn’t understand how I dropped that far. I know the whole story with how the CATs work and your score depends on the difficulty of questions seen/answered... Overall, I got 29 out of 41 right. I got the first 7 questions right and throughout the test I got a maximum of only 2 questions in a row wrong, spreading out the incorrect answers pretty sporadically - not nearly enough (at least I think) to drop down to that low of a score. Then I compared this to a MGMAT practice test where I got a significantly higher percentage of questions wrong and even went on a string of 7 wrong answers in a row (ouch!), yet I still ended up with a score of 34.

I guess my question is... does Princeton Review’s CAT have a much more sensitive algorithm compared to MGMAT or did I just have a really bad day at the plate? Since I can’t tell the difficulty of the questions, it is quite tough to gage my performance. Does someone out there have any knowledge on this topic? If so, I would really appreciate an answer to ease my worries. Thanks for your help!

[jnelson0612]

Hi,
Please ask your question in the General Strategy forum: general-gmat-strategy-questions-f9.html