MyGMAT, Vacation et all

My much anticipated vacation time has finally begun! Yeay!


Its not going to be much of a vacation though. I have three weeks and think its the right amount of time to peak in my GMAT prep.


I started off the vacation in quite an unusual manner. I had completed a sectional test for each of the 5 GMAT sections and just so that I could look at my performances collectively, I put the scores together in a spreadsheet. One thing lead to another, and with my excelmania, I have now come up with my own way of analysing my perrformance and relate that to what I call a 'MyGMAT' score. It's not E=mc2, but hell it's fun. And having fun while preparing for a good fight is not just a ubiquitious truth, its actually cool(ever watched the movie '300'? The Spartans pile up bodies of Persian soldiers as they awaited another huge Persian battalion to show up for the battle. Not to mention, when the Persians did show up, they freaked out!)


Getting back to the arithmetic I was talking about, I found a way to relate all my sectional test scores so that I could scale them up to a mock GMAT score. Here's what I did and you could do too:


1. Choose a section(say Problem Solving) for which you have completed a test. Get the scores.


2. Order the score by Total Questions, Attempted Questions, Correctly Answered and Incorrectly Answered - each becomes a column in the spreadsheet


Eg: T=16, A=13, C=11, I=2


3. Add two more columns to the above. Call them Speed and Accuracy. Get values for them as below(both expressed in percentages)


Speed=Attempts/Total
Accuracy=Correct/Attempts


Eg: From the above scores, S = 13/16 = 81.25% and A=11/13=84.62%


4. Get the cumulative score which is (Speed+Accuracy)/2


Eg: Cumulative score for Problem Solving= (81.25+84.62)/2 = 82.93


5. Repeat the above for the other sections DS, RC, CR and SC


6. Once you have the Cumulative sectional scores, the next step is to get the 'Ability scores', which is quite simple as indicated below:


Quant Ability(QA) Score: (PS+DS)/2
Verbal Ability(VA) Score: (RC+CR+SC)/3


7. To arrive at your GMAT score average out the 'Ability scores' and scale it to 800 as shown below:


MyGMAT = 800*(QA+VA)/2


Once you have a spreadsheet ready with the columns and the formulae, you are ready to score yourself. And since Speed and Accuracy weigh equally on the final score, the MyGMAT will only reach towards the magical 800 score only if you manage to finish both sections with high accuracy.


So here were my individual sectional scores(from each of the 5 tests I have taken)

With my sectionals, it was evident that I sucked in DS and RC, but I was wondering how this would affect my overall score. That can be seen by the Cumulative scores.

DS pulled down my Quant ability score to 75% a and RC did the same to my Verbal score, bringing it down to 87%. And my overall score stood at 649.



The good thing about this is that one can scale up sectional test scores to a overall score without having to take a full length test. It's very useful to track progress on individual sections. You can plug in your latest DS score inplace of your old score and see how your prep has affected your overall score without having to take a complete test.

One can use this when one is running out of study material too. Do 20 problems from each section and plug in the values to see if you are on track.

So, there it is! my two cents to anyone who cares to read.

And I will keep up the Blogging Spirit(or BS, no pun intended ;) ), by regularly posting my scores.

So Long!!