GMAT Strategy

How costly are careless mistakes in the exam?

From reading GMAT forums about how the test works, it moves your score up and down depending on the questions you get right or wrong. Theoretically, if you miss a question, it will give you an easier question, and then if you get that question correct, it will bump you back up to a harder question, etc.

However, I have also read posts from people who would seem to have easy questions throughout the entire exam and then would end up getting a low score because the exam would never give them harder questions. Why does that happen?

If the algorithm works as above, then why would those people not get harder questions as the test progresses? Do they keep missing easy questions and keep getting their scores bumped down, or does the exam "give up" after a point once it thinks it knows your level and just continues to give you questions of that level no matter what?

From my study so far, I've found that I sometimes make careless errors, even on the easier questions, so I'm wondering just how costly missing one really would be on the exam, or if I'd have a chance to make up for that mistake assuming I get other questions correct?

From my understanding it is the first ten or so questions that are of the most significance. They determine the largest range of your score, say 600-700, or 700-800. The rest of the questions fine tune it down to a 650 and such. So missing five questions at the start may peg you in the 400-500 range, while getting everything after that correct will put you around 490. However, if you are getting them all correct you will be in the 700+ category, and missing the last five will leave you around that 750 mark. So five questions is not five questions.

Ian Stewart wrote: As for the original question, there are two reasons (at least) that people might find their questions easy yet get a poor score-

-often GMAT questions are harder than they seem. I think a lot of people often think they've answered a question correctly, but in reality have not. Someone who falls into a lot of traps will not likely score well, and will therefore see a lot of easier questions;

I've wondered about this idea myself. Since I've been visiting this forum and some other places, I've read posts from people who will write about how they easily went through every problem in the books, but I've often gotten the impression that they aren't really learning the material in some cases. So they get to the test, get through it thinking they nailed it, and boom! Lower score than they expected.

I see it happen at work a lot too, for that matter.

Still, I had to wonder about it because I'd heard so many different things about how the test adapts. Thanks for the link to that thread. I'll definitely be taking a look at it.

-careless errors, if they are frequent, could also lead to this situation. I'd guess most people make one or two careless mistakes during a test, and you can recover easily enough from a mistake or two, but someone who consistently makes careless mistakes will obviously have some difficulty doing well in the test.

I was curious and went back to my first practice test that I took a week and a half ago. I'd gotten a 580 on it, but I don't remember the quantitative/verbal breakdown, but verbal was higher.

I took this test without any previous GMAT study or brushing up on any math or verbal concepts and it had been years since I'd had calculus much less any other math besides statistics and quantitative methods, both of which I took over this past year.

It turns out I missed the first 8 questions in quantitative, then missed questions 12, 17, 26, 28, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35. Timing was definitely an issue toward the end, though I didn't leave any blank.

In verbal, I missed questions 1, 2, 5, 15, 19, 22, 24, 28, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41. Again, timing was an issue toward the end, though I didn't leave any blank.

I think if the first 10 questions determined the score, then I'd probably barely be pushing 300 on this practice test, so something else at a later point raised my score.

On a good note, I've re-learned how to do a lot of the things that I'd forgotten, so it will be interesting to see how my next practice test is affected.

If you do make careless mistakes, you should do your best to address them- figure out in which situations you make them, and then do what you need to to make sure you don't make them on the real test- slow down, check your work, etc. If you make a careless mistake during practice, you'll probably do so on the real thing as well unless you do something about it.

Making careless mistakes is definitely one of my weaknesses, so I've been working on trying to discover just why I make them and how best to improve. Timing contributes the most, but not always.