Penalty on Unanswered Questions

Question

I recently took the GMAT and did not finish the last two questions on the quant section. It sounds dumb as hell but I was not prepared to use a dry erase board and my hand smudged up my work on several late problems. Wound up in the 80th percentile on the quant section, with a pretty huge gap between Q and V. A lot of people claim that the test substantially penalizes unfinished sections. Can anybody put a number on that penalty? Where would I have ended up had I just finished the damn section?

Answer 1

Hi Shannan,

Given they were the last questions the penalty, which I don't believe there is for unanswered questions, would have been minimal (your score was already pretty much determined by the machine). The GMAT penalizes for wrong answers, essentially it bumps your score down a notch and gives you an "easier" question, but it's really getting consecutive questions wrong that decreases your score drastically. To answer your question, had you guessed and answered last two questions both wrong, I imagine you might be in the 77-80 ranged, if you'd answered both right perhaps the 80-83 range, and if one right one wrong you'd probably be right where you are.

If you don't answer a lot of questions naturally you have no chance of improving your "internal score" that goes up and down during the questions you answer and started from a baseline (400?,500?), the exact number of which I forget. Basically not answering questions means giving up your chance to improve your score, though not necessarily decrease it.

Hope this helps.

-Michael