7 Reasons Why Your Practice Test Scores Don’t Match Your Actual GMAT or EA Scores
UPDATED FOR THE NEW GMAT IN 2024
One of the most painful things in the GMAT or Executive Assessment (EA) world is a massive test-day letdown. If you spend time on any of the GMAT forums, you’ll see tons of anguished posts that share a similar trait: a huge discrepancy between test-takers’ practice test scores and their actual GMAT or EA scores.
In the geeky spirit of GMAT Critical Reasoning, our goal in this article is to help you resolve that discrepancy. So here are seven reasons why your test-day scores might be lower than your practice test scores:
You’ve taken non-official GMAT or EA tests
If you’ve read some of our other GMAT or EA posts, you’ve heard this story before: the creators of the GMAT and EA spend thousands of dollars developing every official test question, and even the best test-prep companies can’t possibly compete with that.
Of course, it’s even harder for test-prep companies to combine those (inevitably somewhat flawed) questions into a realistic practice test. For example, test-prep companies struggle to mimic the GMAT's use of experimental questions, or the exact mix of, say, algebra and statistics questions.
To make things worse, if you’ve relied heavily on the materials written by a single test-prep company, then you’ll probably do disproportionately well on that company’s practice exams. It stands to reason that the methods taught by Company X would be more effective on the GMAT questions written by that same company.
Sure, some of the higher-quality “knockoff” tests can still be good practice, at least for quant. But you’ll always want to take the scores with a huge grain of salt, and if you’re relying particularly heavily on one company’s GMAT or EA practice tests, then you might want to be especially skeptical of those results.
2. You’re repeating the official GMAT or EA practice tests
In a perfect world, we’d all rely exclusively on the official GMAT and Executive Assessment exams (available via mba.com and gmac.com, respectively). The problem, of course, is that GMAC only offers six official GMAT practice exams and just four EA exams – and those might not be enough for you.
Plenty of students choose to retake the official GMAT or EA practice exams, and that’s not a terrible idea: you’ll always learn something from these tests, and you’ll always see at least a few new questions. The only problem is that you also have some risk of seeing familiar questions – particularly if you take the practice tests more than twice – and that will bias your score upwards.
Whenever we say that to our students, we hear the same objection: “Yeah, but I don't really remember the questions, so the scores are probably accurate, right?”
Sorry, but that’s not true. Even if you don’t consciously remember any questions, you’ll be able to answer them much, much faster if you’ve seen them before. Try reading a novel that you read 10 years ago, but don’t consciously remember. I promise that you’ll read it much faster – and you’ll absorb much more detail and nuance – than you did the first time around.
The bottom line: even a few repeated questions can completely change your experience on the official GMAT and EA practice tests. You’ll feel less time-pressured, and your score will certainly inflate by at least a few points – and possibly by far more than a few points.
So please be really, really thoughtful about how you use those official GMAT and EA practice tests. If you need to repeat them, that’s OK – but don’t trick yourself into thinking that your scores on repeated practice tests are accurate. Because they probably aren’t.
3. You’re repeating questions from the official GMAT or EA practice tests
This one is sneaky: if you're a regular consumer of questions from GMAT forums or other free sources, there’s a very good chance that you’re inflating your GMAT or EA practice test scores every time you study, without even noticing.
The internet is filled with official GMAT questions from all sorts of sources – including the official GMAT practice exams from mba.com. And even if you don’t repeat the official GMAT or EA practice tests themselves, your scores will also be inflated if you’ve seen the questions somewhere online.
So if you’re using one of the GMAT forums such as GMAT Club, keep a close eye on question sources. If you notice that a question comes from the official GMAT practice exams, you might want to skip it, unless you've already thoroughly exhausted the official GMAT practice exams and have no intention of taking them again.
4. All test-prep materials are based on official GMAT and EA questions
You’re not going to like this one.
When test-prep companies develop our own resources – such as guides, practice tests, and practice questions – we inevitably draw inspiration from official GMAT and EA sources. And since the official practice tests are the closest thing to the actual GMAT and EA exams, we have to rely particularly heavily on those official tests.
There’s no way around it: every test-prep company writes their own “knockoffs” of official GMAT and EA practice test questions. The best GMAT and EA test-prep companies will artfully make their versions look drastically different from the originals; lazier firms will just swap out a few details.
So if you’re ever had the feeling that the actual GMAT or EA “feels weird” compared to the official practice tests, here’s one potential reason: you’ve seen tons of questions that closely resemble the official practice test questions, before you ever even touch the software. If this is the case for you, you’ll feel comfortable on the practice tests, but then the questions on your actual GMAT or EA exam might feel more foreign – and your score might drop as a result.
5. You’re fundamentally inconsistent on the GMAT or EA
You won’t like this one very much, either.
We recently received an inquiry from a long-suffering GMAT test-taker who couldn’t figure out why his actual GMAT scores -- ranging from 545 to 595 on six attempts -- were so much lower than his “best official GMAT practice test score of 675.”
Well, here are the scores from his first attempt at each of the official mba.com exams:
Official GMAT practice test #1: 585
Official GMAT practice test #2: 675
Official GMAT practice test #3: 555
Official GMAT practice test #4: 615
Official GMAT practice test #5: 555
Official GMAT practice test #6: 565
When you average these six scores, the result is just under 595 – close to his top score on the actual exam.
There are two takeaways here. First, don’t trick yourself into thinking that your best score is somehow your “real score.” Based on his practice tests, this test-taker should have expected to score in the mid-to-high 500s – and that’s pretty much what happened. Praying for “a good test day” is rarely a winning strategy on the GMAT or EA, and that’s basically what he was doing, without realizing it.
More importantly, these test scores clearly belong to a wildly inconsistent test-taker, and that’s a huge problem. The key to the GMAT or EA isn’t cramming tons of knowledge into your head; it’s figuring out how to apply CONSISTENT techniques and reasoning habits every single time you see a particular type of question.
If your official GMAT or EA practice test scores are all over the place, they’re trying to tell you something: you fundamentally lack consistency and you’re employing different processes at different moments, depending on your mood or your energy levels or the direction of the wind. Until your performance is consistent, there’s no reason to expect a great GMAT or EA score – and it shouldn’t surprise you if your test-day performance is much worse than your best practice tests.
So be honest with yourself: until your practice test results are CONSISTENTLY in your target range, it’s unlikely that you’ll earn the score you want on the actual GMAT or EA.
6. You’re fatigued on GMAT or EA test day
In a perfect world, you’ll feel exactly the same on test day as you do when you’re taking a GMAT or EA practice exam. But that’s not realistic: you’ll likely be amped on your test day – regardless of whether you take the GMAT in a test center or online – and your adrenaline will probably be flowing.
And maybe you’ll run out of gas as a result of all of that excitement. Every once in a while, I hear from a GMAT test-taker who simply got fatigued at the end of their exam – even though the current version of the GMAT features just two hours and 15 minutes of testing time, making it far shorter than some of previous versions of the exam.
If fatigue is an issue for you on test day, maybe you need to do more full practice tests, or it might help to practice with some extra-hard LSAT materials, just to build up your stamina. Or maybe more sleep or a better test-day diet would help. Or you could always choose a different section order on the GMAT, so that the sections that feel easier for you appear at the end of your exam.
The bottom line: test-day fatigue is definitely a very fixable problem, especially given the brevity of the EA and the modern version of the GMAT.
7. You struggle with test anxiety on the GMAT or EA
This is the elephant in the room: most people get a little bit nervous when they’re taking a high-stakes test like the GMAT or EA. Roughly ⅓ of all students experience test anxiety, and the rate appears to be substantially higher among high performers, such as medical students and MBA applicants.
A full discussion of test anxiety could easily fill an entire book, so we won’t say too much about it here. But if your GMAT or EA scores suddenly drop on test day, there’s a pretty good chance that nerves are playing a role – even if you aren’t consciously jittery.
If this is the case for you, we’d recommend starting with this article about the basics of overcoming test anxiety, or our videos on anxiety and test-day performance. But whatever you do, please don’t sweep your test-day anxiety under the rug and pretend that it didn’t happen. Be honest with yourself – or else you’ll have no chance of overcoming the problem.
STILL NOT SURE WHAT HAPPENED ON YOUR GMAT? REVIEW THE “DETAILED PERFORMANCE INSIGHTS” ON YOUR SCORE REPORT.
Along with your GMAT Focus Edition score report, you will now receive some (free) additional data, which GMAC refers to as “detailed performance insights.” This is similar to what test-takers used to receive when they ordered an Enhanced Score Report for the old version of the GMAT, offering you granular feedback on which questions you missed and how you allocated your time.
This portion of your score report can’t tell you everything, but it can give you some idea of what happened. For example, it might tell you that your time management was erratic or that you had a meltdown on one specific question type.
Of course, this data can’t tell you why you made those mistakes. But it can at least point you in the right direction if you’re not sure which of our seven reasons explains why your score dropped on test day. And if you need one-on-one tutoring to help you untangle your GMAT or EA scores, feel free to contact us, and we'll do our best to help.