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Last Updated on November 23, 2023
If you’re preparing for the GMAT as part of your process of applying to business school, you may have heard that some of the questions on the GMAT are experimental. If so, you may be wondering what experimental GMAT questions are, how many of the questions are experimental, and how the experimental questions affect the test-taking experience and your GMAT score. So, I’m going to answer these questions in this article, starting with explaining what exactly experimental questions on the GMAT are.
- What Are Experimental Questions on the GMAT?
- How Many Experimental Questions Appear on the GMAT
- How GMAT Experimental Questions Affect Your Test-Taking Experience and Strategy
- In Conclusion
What Are Experimental Questions on the GMAT?
As you’re likely aware, the GMAT is a standardized test that the test-makers seek to keep consistent from test to test and from year to year. In order to do so, the test-makers have to test the questions that appear on the GMAT for performance and difficulty before they use them. So, to test the questions, they include some experimental questions in every test-taker’s GMAT. These experimental questions appear in the Quantitative Reasoning section, the Verbal Reasoning section, and the Integrated Reasoning section. None appear in the Analytical Writing Assessment since the AWA doesn’t include any multiple choice questions.
Of course, it’s only fair that your performance on questions that are being tested doesn’t count toward your score. So, as you would expect, the GMAT experimental questions on the GMAT don’t count toward your section scores or your final score.
OK, now that we know what GMAT experimental questions are, let’s discuss how many of the quant questions and verbal questions on the GMAT are experimental, since your performance on the quant and verbal sections is what determines your GMAT total score.
How Many Experimental Questions Appear on the GMAT
The makers of the GMAT don’t publish the number of experimental questions that appear on the exam. However, by reviewing information from test-takers Enhanced Score Reports (ESRs) we can tell how many experimental questions are included in the quant section and the verbal section. So, let’s do so and see how many experimental questions there are on these two important sections of the GMAT.
The Number of Experiment Questions on the Quant Section
Let’s first see how many experimental questions there are on the quant section of the GMAT. As you may be aware, the quant section of the GMAT has 31 questions in total. However, only some of the questions, and not the experimental questions, count toward your score. So, by using ESR information to determine how many questions count toward your score, we can calculate how many experimental questions appear on the quant section.
The graph below is from the quant portion of a GMAT test-taker’s ESR. Each of the four columns represents a quarter of the counted questions on the quant section. Notice that all of the percentages on the graph are multiples of 14.3 rounded to the nearest whole number. For example, the lowest number is 14, which is obviously a multiple of 14.3 rounded to the nearest whole number. Also, 29 = 14.3 x 2 rounded, 57 = 14.3 x 4 rounded, and 86 = 14.3 x 6 rounded.
The reason these numbers are interesting is that 100/7 = approximately 14.3. So, what we can tell from this ESR information is that each quarter of the quant section includes 7 counted questions. Thus, the entire quant section includes 4 x 7 = 28 counted questions. So, since there are 31 questions in total on the quant section, there must be 31 – 28 = 3 experimental questions on the quant section of the GMAT.
OK, now that we know how many experimental questions are included in the quant section of the GMAT, let’s see how many experimental questions there are in the verbal section.
The Number of Experimental Questions on the Verbal Section
The graph below is from the verbal portion of a GMAT test-taker’s ESR. Each of the four columns represents around a quarter of the questions on the verbal section.
Now, this graph is different from the graph of the quarters of the quant section in the following way. While the percentages in the middle two columns of this graph are multiples of 14.3 rounded to the nearest whole number like the ones on the quant section graph, the percentages on the first and last column are different. In fact, the percentages in the first and last column are multiples of 12.5 rounded to the nearest whole number. In other words, 25 = 12.5 x 2, and 38 = 12.5 x 3 rounded.
These numbers are interesting because 100/8 = 12.5. So we can tell that the first and last quartiles of the verbal section include 8 counted questions each, while the middle two quartiles include 7 counted questions each, as the quarters of the quant section do. So, the total number of counted questions on the verbal section of the GMAT is 2 x 8 + 2 x 7 = 30. Thus, since there are a total of 36 questions on the verbal section, there must be 36 – 30 = 6 experimental questions on the verbal section of the GMAT.
Now that we know how many experimental questions are included in the quant and verbal sections of the GMAT, let’s discuss how the experimental questions affect your test-taking experience and your test-taking strategy.
How GMAT Experimental Questions Affect Your Test-Taking Experience and Strategy
One obvious way in which experimental questions on the GMAT affect your test taking experience is by making the test a little longer than it would be without them. However, this is not the only effect on the test-taking experience the experimental questions have
A much more important effect of the experimental questions is that they affect the difficulty of the questions you see. For instance, since the GMAT exam is an adaptive test, if you are scoring high on the quant section, you’d expect to see hard questions. However, since experimental questions are uncounted questions, they can be of any difficulty level. So, in the middle of scoring high on GMAT quant, you could see some easy experimental questions.
Similarly, you could see hard experimental questions on the GMAT when you don’t expect to see any hard questions, such as in a case in which you are not scoring high on a section or at the beginning of a section.
So, what does this information mean to us? One thing it means is that seeing an easy question on the test doesn’t mean that you are missing questions or scoring low. It could just be that you are seeing an easy experimental question.
Another thing it means is that, on your GMAT, you could see experimental questions that are more difficult than you are ready to handle. For instance, you could be comfortably scoring 38 on the verbal section of the GMAT and suddenly see a 51 level experimental verbal question. Or, toward the beginning of the quant section, when you expect to see medium level questions, you could see a hard question that you don’t know how to answer.
Of course, what this information highlights is that you should guess and move on if you are totally stumped by a GMAT question. After all, it could be an experimental question that’s above the level of difficulty of the questions you need to answer correctly to achieve your GMAT score goal.
In Conclusion
So, now you know all about experimental questions on the GMAT. To learn more about the structure and scoring of the GMAT you could read this post on the format of the GMAT and this one on how the GMAT is scored.
