Doubt With MGMAT Scoring

[bangu]

Hi

I had been taking MGMAT exams for last couple of weeks (no retake though, so far taken 1 free CAT exam and 5 CATs, left with 1 CAT for the final week).
In my last three exams I had following break up:

1) 780
2) 770
3) 770

In the first two exams I had quite a few wrong questions, however, still scored high. In my last exam I had only 6 wrong in quant and only 6 wrong in verbal and I still end up getting same score as previously.

Did MGMAT recently recalibrated the scoring system to reflect the actual GMAT pattern or am I getting some skewed results? By recent I mean within last week or so, because I took exam today.

I would also request MGMAT instructor to clarify on following points:

1) Although I do scored 50/51 consistently in Quant section (barring my first exam in which I managed only 45 as I took it as Diagnostics), I found MGMAT Quant gruelling. Is it the actual representative of GMAT or actual GMAT is easier than this or tougher than this?
2) I am not that great in verbal, so always find it some what tougher from whatever source I do. Is the MGMAT CAT reflective of actual GMAT pattern? The occasion, when I scored 780, I found verbal exam relatively, however, in subsequent 2 CATs I found verbal to be quite tough. In fact in my last exam I had 2 Bold face CRs, and 1 Scientific RC passage with 96 lines.

I know these questions are surely discussed earlier and I did see old pattern, however, I am worried about the new pattern that I see. Even in GMAT now a days, quite a few students are getting unusally low scores in verbal despite their performing good in mock CATs. Is it the result of "Scoretop" that GMAT had been made tougher.

Sorry about the long post and thanks in advance.

Regards
Abhijeet Sen

[StaceyKoprince]

We have not recently changed our algorithm. You are scoring very highly and you have used all 6 CATs (the free exam does count as one of the 6, unfortunately, as far as the algorithm is concerned). You are essentially "running out" of test questions at the very high end, and the algorithm is not allowed to give you questions you've already seen before until you get to the 7th exam. The result is that you get some lower level questions than you really should be getting (though the algorithm factors this into your score and keeps it high).

Many of my students do tell me they think our quant is harder than the official quant. Partially, I think we have a few too many computation-intensive problems, and partially this is due to the "experimental effect." Basically, the real test includes experimentals; ours doesn't. Experimentals come at any difficulty level, so some will be lower level. If you are a high-level quant test taker, then you are going to get some "freebies" (in terms of quant questions that are easy for you), but you don't get those on our tests.

Re: verbal, some students tell me they think ours is easier and some tell me they think ours is harder... which generally means it's just about right and the variation depends on the mix of questions you happen to get on a particular test. As you've seen, it can make a big difference if you happen to get a few more questions in your areas of strength vs. your areas of weakness. That's part of what factors into the relatively wide standard error on this test.

[GreyMATter]

Oh, you are getting really high scores. Good job. (Daarun dada, chaaliye jaan)

[StaceyKoprince]

Yeah, I should add - if you are also scoring that well on GMATPrep - you should get in there and take the real thing!!