World Time Zone difference and GMAT test taking strategy ...

[vikashee]

Dear All

Recently .. I was sharing some reviews of TOP GMAT scores , with a formal GMAT test taker and a faculty to one of the GMAT prepration classes in my city ( Pune , India )
As per him.. It hardly matters , at what point of time you give the exam.. because whenever u r giving the exam.. u r practically competing against Asians only .. who r all good in quant .. so end of the day .. you only get advantage of being exceptional in verbal if you want to get a good score .

He proved his fact by stating time zone differences of few states in Canada and US ...


I am not debating on which subject ..i.e quant or verbal is important .. but would like to understand .. is it fine if i conclude that while giving the GMAT practically asians are competing with Asians only

Regards

Vikas

[StaceyKoprince]

No, this is not accurate (if I understand correctly what you're asking).

The scores are normalized across ALL candidates worldwide over a period of years, not a single day or a few hours of one day. If you take the test tomorrow, the percentile ranking you get is based not on the performance of others taking the test right when you take the test but on how people did on the test yesterday, last week, 2, 3, and 6 months ago and even longer.

Now, when admissions officers look at scores, it is possible that they might have different standards for different classes of candidates. It's very common for candidates in Asia and India to have quite high quant scores - so, while a 90th percentile quant score means that you scored better than 90 percent of the candidates worldwide (in quant), that doesn't mean you are better than 90 percent of Indian test takers on quant. (In fact, you likely aren't - because the pool of Indian testers, in general, scores better on quant than, say, North American testers.)

But that really depends on the school and what standards they choose to set for admissions. That doesn't change your actual score.

[vikashee]

Many thanks for your response .

But this gets me back to the same question ,which I asked from my friend ( The GMAT faculty in my city) . The question was, being weak in verbal and strong in quant ... is their any particular time in year to take GMAT , when I could compete against a similar crowd and get better chances of scoring good on verbal.
Hope my question is clear ..

[StaceyKoprince]

Nope. The scores are "normalized" across a 5-year timeframe. That is, all scores going back 5 years from right now are "comparable" across all students in that timeframe. It doesn't matter whether you take the test in June or December, whether you take it in the US or India - none of that will affect your score.