After teaching GMAT preparation in New York for 3 years, I transferred to Kaplan’s London Center.  While working out of the London Center, I taught classes in Ireland, Germany and Italy, in addition to the United Kingdom, and have discovered a few major differences between taking the GMAT in the United States and in Europe.  These differences can be broken down into two categories: GMAT content and test administration.

While GMAT content is the same no matter where one takes the exam, students who hail from outside the States often have very different concerns than American test takers, especially in the verbal section.  Students whose native language is one other than English often worry about the sentence correction portion of the test.  However, though most would expect a native speaker to have the advantage on a test of grammar, one must remember that native speakers, for the most part, did not actually learn much grammar formally when they learned the language.  Non-native speakers, who have been taught grammar rules from the outset of learning the language, can actually have an easier time approaching sentence correction problems in a systematic manner – a manner far more effective at leading to the correct answer than simply finding the choice that “sounds” right.

Similar concerns often arise for British students when learning that idioms are tested on the GMAT.  An idiom is a commonly accepted combination of words that has no specific grammatical underpinning.  Basically, it is right because the GMAT says it is right.  However, in Britain the commonly accepted phrase is often different from the one accepted in the States.  For example, most American students would say they are enrolled in a Kaplan course, while most British students would say they are enrolled on a Kaplan course.  While dealing with idioms can be a bit tricky initially, it generally just requires some memorization to get around, which is why Kaplan provides a list of the most commonly tested idioms in our GMAT preparation materials.

The second big difference is in test administration.  Just as is the case in the United States, Pearson Vue administers the GMAT in Europe.  However, students in Europe are much more limited in the number of test location/time/date options.  For this reason, it is even more important for student outside the United States to make sure they sign up for a test date as soon as they know when and where they would like to take their exam.  Remember that, just as in the United States, you can change your test date after signing up, as long as you do so more than five business days before your exam; also, keep in mind that the GMAC will charge you US$50 for this service.

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.

It’s essential to prepare for the GMAT with full-length computer adaptive tests (CATs), because the CAT format has lots of unique features (for example, the importance of skipped questions). Bottom line: you need to get your hands on some CATs and make sure that you practice wisely with them, because they are a relatively scarce resource.

Even to those (very wise) test takers who have enrolled in a comprehensive program of that kind, the two free GMATPrep® tests available at mba.com is a key part of practice.

Three things that make GMATPrep® tests special:

1.  They are created by GMAC, the creators of the GMAT itself.
2.  They include retired test questions from the actual GMAT. (The only other source to do that is the Official Guide, also by GMAC.)
3.  They give very accurate scores.

The tests can be downloaded here.

Drawbacks to the GMATPrep® tests:

1.  There are only two of them.
2.  They don’t offer explanations.
3.  They don’t provide diagnostic results.

A comprehensive GMAT course includes a battery of full-length practice tests that are enhanced by explanations and diagnostic results. So that addresses the drawbacks.

Take a GMATPrep® test when you want to have a really good idea of your current GMAT ability. You don’t need to spend $250 to take the GMAT and get an idea of your score (and partly for that reason, doing so may send a message to admissions officers that you aren’t approaching the b-school process seriously or competently).

Since there are only two GMATPrep® tests, you need to conserve them. Save at least one for the moment when you think you’re really really ready to go rock the test. A GMATPrep® test is a good reality check at that point – if you have a representative test experience (i.e., not too many distractions) when you take one and your score is much lower than you think it should be, you might want to reconsider your test schedule.

One final note: test takers have copied many of the GMATPrep® questions into forums for group discussions. There is certainly value to this behavior, since the tests don’t contain explanations, but it’s something my students have appreciated a heads-up about.