IR Scoring

[RonPurewal]

To build on what Tim wrote—LOTS of students waste brainpower worrying about things that there's no reason to worry about.

Here, it's "experimental questions". Even if they did exist, you wouldn't be able to identify them. So, from a practical standpoint, there's no possible benefit to be gained by considering the issue.

More commonly, people think about "difficulty levels" when they're looking at problems. You should also NEVER think about "difficulty levels", because (a) no one can accurately gauge them on sight, and, more importantly, (b) even if the "difficulty level" were indicated with a big red number on the screen, it still wouldn't help you in any way.

[RonPurewal]

In fact, I need to be more emphatic about the above points.

It's not just "There's no reason to think about these things". Actually, it's worse—it's "Thinking about these things will hurt your performance on the test".

They are distractions.
Major distractions.

In terms of attention and concentration, there's really no such thing as a "minor" distraction.
Think of how people turn down the car radio when looking for a building—because even a bit of sound is a distraction... from something as simple as finding a number on a building!

If it's hard to maintain concentration even on something so simple, then, as you might imagine, the impact of being distracted from solving problems by thoughts of "difficulty levels" or "experimental questions" is absolutely devastating.

When you're solving the problems, you should be thinking about only two things:
1/ The problem in front of you;
2/ See #1.

[sw001]

Thank you Ron for your reply. Yes, absolutely agree. I wanted to be at least aware of the fact. But, yes it shouldn't affect how i am attempting the questions.

Thanks :)

[tim]

Great explanation, Ron. I always deflect questions about difficulty; in fact, my standard response is:

"I've found that the answers to this type of question are almost never useful in preparing someone for the GMAT, so I'll decline to provide a guess as to difficulty level unless you can tell us how you will use that information to better prepare yourself for the GMAT."

I don't believe anyone has ever been able to adequately answer that challenge.

[RonPurewal]

People tend to be obsessed with numbers in general. Think of, say, people's preoccupation with scale weight--a relatively meaningless measure--versus, say, how they look in the mirror, or their waist measurement, or whatever.

[RonPurewal]

In general, while you're learning how things work, you should try not to be preoccupied with ANY numerical measures.

E.g.,

• Time:
Here are 2 things that humans CANNOT do at the same time:
1/ Get better at things
2/ Get faster at those things
Can't do both. Think about what would happen if you tried to "speed up" a dance step while you were still learning it.
Same deal with cognitive skills. If you're just learning how something works, it doesn't matter how long you take at first. Once you HAVE the skill, then you can worry about "getting faster". But not until then.

• Score:
Again, think about dance steps. Imagine you're someone who is just learning to dance the tango.
Would you be worried about the score you'd get from a judge in a competition? Well, of course not. Not yet. You'd worry about that only later, when you were essentially finished with skill-building, and ready for competition.
Same thing here. Overall GMAT score should be a non-concern until you think you're nearly finished with the skill-building phase of your preparation. Before that point, it's just another distraction.

Unlike difficulty levels, these two do eventually become important. (Difficulty levels never become important, unless you become one of the test writers.) The point is, though, that they don't matter until long after most people have gotten hung up on them.

[sherlock]

Hi,

Recently I took one of the MGMAT test, and I got 7 correct in the IR section, which means I should get a score of atleast 6, right? But much to my disappointment I got a score of only 4.92. Is this really possible on the real GMAT as well?
How to identify which questions are marked higher and which aren't?
And could this discrepancy be there because I got some of the experimental questions correct, which were not counted for my final IR score?

Thanks

[RonPurewal]

your IR score on the official test is going to be an integer from 1 through 8.

there's no simple linear relationship between the number of questions correct and the score. (among other things, the scaled score depends on how the questions perform as "experimental" items -- and that's going to vary from set to set.)

MUCH MORE IMPORTANTLY -- there's no point in thinking about this sort of thing!
even if you had precise answers to these questions, those answers COULD NOT possibly help you do any better on the exam, in any way whatsoever... and they might well actually make you perform WORSE on the exam (by creating additional stress).

the only thing you can do, ultimately, is make your best possible effort to answer each item (and quickly move on when you get stuck).