Last Thursday I had the pleasure of attending the GMAC Test Prep Summit and hearing about the GMAT from GMAC’s VP of Research, himself a senior psychometrician (”psychometrician” = GMAT wizard). Over the course of the day I picked up a lot of invaluable nuggets about how the test is scored, and over the next weeks I’ll share these nuggets with you.

Today’s topic: skipped or omitted questions.

You can’t really “skip” questions on the GMAT, but if you run out of time you may leave some unanswered at the end and those questions are referred to as skipped or omitted questions. A few Key Takeaways:

1.   Skipped questions can hurt your score really badly – even worse than you think.

2.   It’s complex to answer how much a skipped question hurts your score, but given Key Takeaway #1 above, the complexity doesn’t matter much from your perspective.

Skipped questions hurt your score more when you are scoring high. Here is real data, shared by GMAC:

·   If your percentile score is otherwise 70th, and you skip one question, your score drops to 65th percentile.

·   If your percentile score is otherwise 70th, and you skip three questions, your score drops to 55th percentile.

The exact science is complex. In fact, these figures were presented as empirical results – implying that these results are not transparent in the scoring algorithm, but that rather, they must be inferred after the fact from test-takers scores.

Forget about that. Instead, meditate on those two bullet points. Five percentile points for one skipped question. Given that the effect is pronounced at higher scores, I’d wager that if you’re dancing near a 700 level performance on one section, around 90th percentile, then omitting one question could drop you a good 7 percentile points. Your weeks, months of GMAT prep that you’ve put in (around 100 hours for those scoring 700+) to raise the ceiling of your performance could be thrown away simply by mismanaging your last few seconds.

Lessons

Don’t omit any questions.

While it’s generally not to your advantage to finish very early, it would be much, much better to finish a whopping 60 seconds early, if that’s what you have to do to make sure you don’t omit any questions.

More nuggets coming up. They are equally earth-shattering, so stay tuned.

For many GMAT test-takers, the biggest challenge in GMAT practice isn’t Data Sufficiency, Sentence Correction, or permutations, but rather finding the time to practice at all.  On average, the 700+ scorer prepares for about 100 hours for the exam, and finding those hours can seem impossible when you’re trying to keep your job, get promoted, avoid swine flu, and maybe even have a life.

Recently I coached a few of my students at one of Kaplan’s premiere corporate partners on this issue.  My advice: the Punchcard Method.

The time card is an obsolete technology for the average b-school applicant (aged late twenties, on average, for a male, and a couple years younger for a female).  In decades past, you used to enter your time card in a machine that clocked how many hours you worked.

If you were showing up, but not contributing to work much beyond that, people said you were just “punching the card.”  Doesn’t sound like a killer GMAT study strategy, does it?  Nevertheless, if you’re having trouble finding time to practice, it’s exactly what I recommend.

Just punch the card.  “Show up” to your GMAT practice, every day, even if that’s all you do.  Make sure you practice at least one question, or spend at least five pages reviewing one proven test strategy, every day.  Don’t worry about how long you study for, as long as you punch the card.

The punchcard method is like having a workout routine that doesn’t focus on how many miles you run or how many hours you’re in the gym; it’s just focused on how many days you actually bother lacing up your sneakers.  (And it’s a pretty good way to stay in shape.)

Imagine a calendar hanging on the wall.  An X marks every day, meaning you punched the card and studied at least a little GMAT.

What you’ll find, when you adhere to the punchcard method, is that some days you will study only five minutes.  But you’ll end up practicing a lot more, and worrying less about time management.