Expect to miss around 50 percent of questions.
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All right GMAT myth number two, I need to get almost all of the questions right on test day
to get a high score? uh I see this one a lot in my YouTube comments uh I see a lot of people who are
really concerned with accuracy who are saying I only get 75% of these questions right in practice
and they're really worked up about that and I have to tell them that that's actually maybe not the
biggest deal in the world uh do you hear this one a lot Eric yeah absolutely it makes sense you know
because of the way that we all tested growing up right you you teach your hands out a test to you
or you know everybody gets the same test on a you know on a computer and it's it's the same
exact questions and therefore in the end it's how many you got right and how many got wrong
and so you know makes sense if you want to get a high score you have to get the majority of the
questions right but again as this is a computer adaptive test right it's built for you right right
so ultimately everyone will get questions that are at some point will be consistently challenging for
them so even people like Erica right who scores super high on the test at some point we're going
to hopefully get up to where we can start to pin her a little bit and we'll start to try to give
her questions that maybe a little bit higher a little bit stronger than even she can handle
I can't imagine there's a whole lot of those but the point is even somebody who gets an 800
still gets questions wrong absolutely and I can confirm that on my test day there were some
questions that were really hard and you know even if they were something that I I maybe could have
answered if I was sitting down at my desk relaxed with a little snack on test day they were really
hard and it just wasn't occurring to me and I had to guess and move on 99th percentile scorer
you're still going to be hitting those harder questions um so this seems like a good time to
go through the algorithm and what makes this test so different yeah that'd be great this is sort of
look at first question to last question and if you think about easy to hard questions and
how they're scored right that those would be comparable right maybe it makes sense so the
harder of the question the the higher the score you know in this situation mainly what this is what we
do with every candidate right so we serve up a middle tier question to everyone so that's what
that little white dot is over there and so let's just say that you're nervous which makes perfect
sense a lot of people aren't you know they they feel comfortable when they're at home but now all
of a sudden they're in a test center and they've had a check in they just want to sort of get into
their their groove they're probably not quite into it until they get into a few questions you might
get this question wrong even though you normally would have gotten this question right so we're
going to then serve up another question to you that's going to be a little bit easier now again
you may still be nervous you may even get that question wrong you're making it right here you got
it wrong and then finally we get you to a question where you're going to get the one right and so now
we're going to give you a harder question and then you're going to start to move up and that little
white dot would have normally been moving up and down here you know to kind of show you that you're
getting a harder and harder question and then we continue and we're ultimately going to get up to
a level where you're going to start getting a question right get a question wrong and we're
going to continue that until the very end so we continue to try to figure out exactly where you
are so if you can kind of see this pattern again you started out at a medium level you got some
questions wrong and normally would've gotten right you finally get down to something that you know
maybe helps you just calm down a little bit and then you're going to move up to your level and
then maybe you're maybe a little higher than your level then a little lower and then we're going to
continue to try to pin you and so what we give to the schools though and what we give to you
is that upper bracket right so it's really which questions that you consistently answer correctly
that's going to impact your score so again it's not how many questions you got right and how many
you got wrong it's really about which questions you got right on a consistent basis so I have a
question for you Eric just to kind of confirm that what I'm sharing with my students is is accurate
your score is a reflection of the difficulty where you're getting about half of them right and half
of them wrong so students should expect that if they're performing at their level which is their
their score level on test day they should expect to miss around 50 of questions when you say that's
accurate absolutely and that's that can be kind of the the challenge is where you need to kind
of stay within yourself because again it's not positive reinforcing you know to have that kind
of experience so I always tell people that you know at some point you're gonna start to feel like
every question it's challenging but doable and you may actually feel like it's a little bit more
challenging than doable but the point is we're trying to get it up to where it's again at your
level and again everyone's going to have the same feeling kind of at the end but where they actually
are feeling that are very different so what Erica test at is going to be a very different level
than where I test out which would probably be very very low well thank you that this is super helpful
um yeah I think that that this is a this is a tough pill to swallow for a lot of my students
especially students who are perfectionists maybe students who have tested well in the past and for
whom this structure is is challenging especially because they can't skip questions where I really
struggled with that concept of of not being able to skip a question right because I I'd be sitting
there going I don't want to miss this and I think if I came back to it I could do it and just that
for me that knowledge that I can miss half of the questions as long as I'm I'm getting roughly at my
level was so freeing absolutely and certainly you know guess when appropriate right that's
part of what's going on here I mean if it makes you feel any better this allows for a shorter
test it's still at an exceptionally high level of reliability and what those scores mean and
how valid they are in predicting your academic success within you know Business Schools right
so if if we're trying to to get an accurate score right so you want an accurate score the
schools you're applying to want an accurate score and all the sub scores and so forth we have to
give you appropriate level questions well if you were just taking it on paper we'd have to
give you a bunch of really easy ones we'd have to give you a bunch of really hard ones we'd
have to give you a bunch in the middle because we don't know where you are but this allows us
to more quickly get there and therefore you have hopefully a better testing experience it makes it
more accurate it also makes it more secure I mean there's lots of benefits you know to this so yeah.
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