Why doesn't GMAC provide detailed score breakdowns?

by **Jack** Fri Jan 23, 2009 9:46 pm

Just curious, but why is it that GMAC's official gmat reports do not give any breakdown of how you did in each section? For example, instead of just providing a verbal scaled score and percentile rank, why don't they let you know how many SC/CR/RC questions you got right/wrong, so that next time you take the test, you can focus in on your weakness area. I mean isn't is possible to rock the SC and CR and then bomb the RC which brings your score way down? You would think, oh, I suck at verbal, but in reality you struggled in only one section of verbal. Same goes for math. Does anyone know if there is any way to get more detailed information on your official scoring results? I'd pay for if it exists, even though they are eye gouging at 250 a pop. Thanks for any suggestions!

Jack

by **StaceyKoprince** Tue Jan 27, 2009 12:03 pm

It is certainly possible to do much better on one question type than another, but just knowing the percentage correct for each question type could be very misleading. The questions you answer are also at different difficulty levels - so let's say your SC percentage correct is lower, but the difficulty levels were the highest of all of the question types on the test. Is SC a weakness? Or was your percentage lower because you happened to get the hardest questions in SC?

So, one possible reason why they don't tell us much is that the data is a LOT more complex than just number right / wrong. And a possible reason why they don't give us all of that more complex data is that it might reveal too much about their algorithm and they don't want to release that data for security reasons.

I'm just speculating above - I don't really know why they don't give us more data. But, unfortunately, there's no way to get that data, at least at this point in time. :(