The GMAT is administered as a computer-adaptive test, or CAT for short. When compared to the traditional paper-and-pencil format, the CAT format has both advantages and disadvantages. One major advantage is flexibility in scheduling a test date. In the past, the GMAT was administered only on specific dates, but the CAT format allows students to schedule the test for whatever time is most convenient. Another advantage is that a computer-adaptive test uses significantly fewer questions to determine a test-taker’s score. Even though the CAT format only slightly reduces total testing time for the GMAT, students have more time to solve each question than they would on a paper-based test.
The main disadvantage of the CAT is that you cannot skip questions or return to a previous question to change your answer. Each question must be answered in the order it is presented, and you cannot view the next question until you have entered a response for the one on your screen. The reason for this lies in how the test is scored: basically, the computer needs to know whether to present a harder or easier question next, and the only way to determine that is by recording your answer for the current question.
The other significant drawback to the CAT is that the ideal pacing strategy for a paper-based test must be abandoned and replaced with a CAT-specific strategy. On the paper-and-pencil test, questions are usually presented in rough order of difficulty (i.e., the questions start out fairly easy and become progressively more difficult throughout the section). In this situation, most students breeze through the first several questions and spend most of their time working on the more difficult questions later in the section. This seemingly sensible approach would prove disastrous if applied to a computer-adaptive test, since the first questions in a CAT section are not easy and the subsequent questions do not necessarily become more difficult. In fact, one test-taker could easily see twenty extremely difficult questions, while a person sitting five feet away taking the same test might not see even one.
Furthermore, not every question on a CAT contributes to a student’s score in the same way: a question that appears early in a CAT section will have a far greater impact on a student’s score than a question that appears later in the section. In contrast, all questions on a paper-based test are weighted equally, regardless of difficulty. This is a critical difference, because it means that some questions on a CAT are more “important” than others and thus demand more time and attention.
TestMasters has developed a systematic pacing strategy specifically for the GMAT, which takes advantage of the CAT format and enables our students to use their time efficiently. Our students spend more time on the questions that impact their scores the most with our CAT-specific pacing strategy.
