Experimental Problems having an impact on official scores?
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02 Oct 2005, 02:29
About one quarter of the questions on the GMAT are experimental. The experimental questions can be standard math, data sufficiency, reading comprehension, arguments, or sentence correction. Unless you have a photographic memory, it is extremely difficult to distinguish between an experimental problem and a really tough legit problem.
Because the "bugs" have not been worked out of the experimental questions--or, to put it more directly, because we are being used as a guinea pig to work out the "bugs"--these unscored questions are often more difficult and confusing than the scored questions.
This brings up an ethical issue: How many students like myself have run into experimental questions early in the test and given a disproportional amount of precious time to solving them thereby putting ourselves at a disadvantage to receiving a score that reflects our true ability? Crestfallen by having done poorly on a few experimental questions, many of us lose confidence and perform dismally on the other parts of the test. Some testing companies are becoming more enlightened in this regard and are administering experimental questions as separate practice tests. Unfortunately, ETS has yet to see the light.
Knowing that the experimental questions can be downright difficult, if you do poorly on a particular question you can take some solace in the hope that it may have been experimental. In other words, do not allow a few difficult questions to discourage your performance on the rest of the test. But therein lies the dilemma: we don`t know which questions will or will not be counted against us so we give 100% to each problem we are faced with.
Clearly, the need for experimental questions can be justified, but at the cost of undermining the true ability of test takers who have not practiced for such problems?