Still many questions are raised in relation to the IR section. The academic director at The Economist’s GMAT Tutor explains how this part of the GMAT is scored.
There is much confusion over how GMAC scores Integrated Reasoning (IR). Let’s simplify it!
The IR section is non-adaptive and doesn’t count towards your 200-800 score. There are 12 questions in this section. Of these, two to four can be experimental. No one really knows what the point value of each question is exactly – otherwise we would know exactly how many experimental questions there are. GMAC would prefer that be kept unknown.
The question order and difficulty levels of the questions are random. All questions have the same point value, regardless of difficulty level. It is fair to say that the four question types will be seen at least once each for each test-taker.
The experimental questions do not count, so the score is based on how many questions one answers correctly out of how many are not experimental. This is your raw score, which is then scaled to a score out of eight. This scaled score is also affected by the general difficulty level of the questions you answered correctly, but the influence is probably minimal. In addition to your raw score, you will also be given a percentile ranking. The percentile rankings have changed since IR’s inception two years ago, but have recently stabilized to the below:
(Percentiles chart from GMAC)
So remember this:
- Don’t try to guess which questions are experimental.
- Timing is crucial here, but do not get stuck anywhere, and work to your strengths.
- You can make mistakes and receive a perfect score.
- Remember to preserve your brain energy for the Quant and Verbal sections on the exam! They are still the most important sections.
- If you are running out of time, GUESS!
Read the original article on the blog of The Economist’s GMAT Tutor.
