What Your 100 to 200 Score ACTUALLY Means

Say it is Sunday night. You just finished a full practice Executive Assessment after a long work week. The screen says 148. Last Sunday it said 151. You close the laptop. By Monday's commute you have decided that you are getting WORSE, that your plan is broken, and that maybe this whole Executive MBA idea was a mistake.

Stop. That 3 point drop probably means almost nothing. The way you are READING your score is hurting you more than any question on the test.

How the score is actually built

The Executive Assessment (the EA) is the admissions test GMAC built for Executive MBA programs. It runs 90 minutes and has three sections of 30 minutes each. There is no essay. You can take it at a test center or online at home. You can find all of this on GMAC's Executive Assessment home page.

• Integrated Reasoning (IR), 12 questions. These mix tables, charts, graphs and short bits of text. Many questions have more than one part.
• Verbal Reasoning, 14 questions. Sentence Correction (pick the version of a sentence with correct grammar and clear meaning), Critical Reasoning (judge a short argument) and Reading Comprehension (answer questions about a passage).
• Quantitative Reasoning, 14 questions. Problem Solving (regular multiple choice math) and Data Sufficiency (decide whether the facts you are given are ENOUGH to answer a question, without fully solving it).

Each section is scored from 0 to 20. Your total runs from 100 to 200. And here is the part most people skim past: all three sections count the SAME toward that total. GMAC's page on the test structure lays out the sections, the question counts and the scoring.

Read that again. A point in IR is worth exactly as much to your total as a point in Quant or a point in Verbal. The section with 12 questions is not the small one. It is a full third of your score.

Why small swings mean so little

A practice test is a measuring device. It is NOT training. It tells you roughly where you are. It does not make you better.

Think of timing your mile on a day you slept four hours. You run slower. Did your fitness disappear overnight? No. The conditions changed. Your practice EA works the same way. You took last week's test fresh on a Saturday morning and this week's after a brutal Thursday and a Friday client dinner.

Now think about how few questions there are. Each section has only 12 or 14. One careless slip on a question you knew how to do, one Reading passage on a topic you happen to enjoy, one graph you misread: any of those can move a section score. On top of that, the test is adaptive, meaning it adjusts what you see based on how you are doing, section by section. Two tests will never hand you the same questions, so two results are never a perfect comparison. If that word makes you nervous, read why adaptive doesn't mean doomed.

So a few points up or down from one test to the next is mostly noise. A TREND across several tests, with real training in between, is the signal.

Say your section scores on two practice tests look like this:

Most people stare at the total and either cheer or panic. Look at the rows instead. None of these moves is a verdict. What matters is WHY each point moved, and you can only find that in the questions themselves.

So which section do you train next?

I'll bet the section you have studied the most is the one you already LIKE. The engineer keeps doing Quant drills. The lawyer keeps polishing Verbal. It feels productive because it feels comfortable.

So decide what you want MORE: to feel good during your study sessions, or a higher total?

Because every section carries equal weight, a point you pick up in your weakest section counts just as much as a point squeezed out of your strongest. And the cheapest points are almost never the hardest questions. They are the ones you already know how to do and are still getting wrong. That is the whole idea behind the points you're missing are easy.

Stop reading and pull up your last practice test. For each section, count the misses on questions you KNEW how to do. Don't read another word until you have three numbers written down.

The section with the biggest number is the one you train next. Not the one that scares you. Not the one you enjoy. The one where you are leaking the most points you already own.

The 5 mistakes I see when people read their EA score

1. Reading one total like a verdict. A 3 point move on one test sends people into a spiral. INSTEAD: look at section scores across several tests, and only react to a pattern that holds.
2. Treating IR as the extra section. It has the fewest questions and the strangest formats, so people save it for last or skip it. INSTEAD: train it like the full third of your score that it is. With only 12 questions, every one you give away hurts.
3. Training your favorite section. Comfort is not a study plan. INSTEAD: train the section with the most gettable misses, based on your notes, not your mood.
4. Taking practice tests back to back to see if the number moved. Weighing yourself every hour does not make you lose weight. INSTEAD: one practice test a week at most, with real training on your mistakes in between.
5. Blaming the clock. People say they ran out of time and call it a pacing problem. INSTEAD: find the cause. Rereading, doing work in your head and using the long method are what eat your 30 minutes. Your pacing problem is a symptom, so treat the disease.

What a gettable point looks like

Here is the kind of Problem Solving question that busy professionals miss all the time, not because it is hard but because they rush the last step.

Notice what won that point. Not genius. Notes on paper, testing the answers, and reading what the question actually asked. That is trainable, which means your score is trainable too.

Your move today

Open your most recent practice test. Write the three section names on a sheet of paper. Next to each, write how many questions you missed that you KNEW how to do. Circle the biggest number. Then redo every one of those missed questions tonight, on paper, with full notes, and write one sentence for each saying exactly why you missed it the first time.

That circled section is your next week of training. Go earn those points.