Low Reading Comp Percentile - Few Wrong Answers - What's Up?

[MaxP870]

Hi,

Thanks in advance for taking the time to respond. I recently took a practice exam with the GMAC software, I scored a 70% (percentile) on CR, 79% on SC, and 58% on RC. This was similar to an actual GMAT exam I took a few weeks ago where my RC was drastically lower than my other sections. When I reviewed the answers on the practice test, I had 4 incorrect SC responses, 4 incorrect CR responses, and 3 incorrect RC questions (11 total for the Verbal section). There were only 11 RC questions on the exam, which seems low. But it seems surprising that that the % of RC questions wrong was not drastically higher than SC or CR, but the percentile is so much lower. The only other thing to note is that I didn't see an RC question until the ~15th question and got 4 questions wrong out of the first 10.

I realize getting 4 questions wrong early hurts and means I might have seen not as difficult RC passages, but this still feels odd that my RC percentile was that much lower.

Any thoughts or insight into the Verbal scoring algorithm would be very helpful.

Thanks!

[StaceyKoprince]

Best guess is that, leading into at least some of your correct RC questions, your score took a little dip, and that meant you were offered lower-difficulty RCs relative to what else you'd been answering. The figure is a percentILE, which is not at all tied to percentAGE correct. If I gave you only 50th percentile questions and you answered 100% correctly...your percentILE would still be 50th even though your percentAGE is 100%.

The other annoying RC-specific thing to know: all of the RC questions are chosen before you start that passage. The algorithm isn't picking the next one as you answer the questions for that passage. So if you go in at a bit of a dip, the whole passage is affected.

Also, I just want to check one thing: you said that there were only 11 RCs on the exam. That would mean that you had one passage with only 2 questions. Can you double-check? The standard is 3 or 4 questions per passage and I doubt the code would even allow it to go down to 2. (Of course, I'm no coder - what do I know?)