How to Analyze the GMAT Enhanced Score Report (ESR)
To analyze your GMAT Enhanced Score Report (ESR), look at the “Percent Correct” graphs to examine your section starts and finishes. Analyze the “Performance Over Time” charts to reveal major time management issues. Finally, look at the “Average Difficulty” charts to spot any preventable, GMAT score-killing errors.
See below for more information on how to analyze the most useful pieces of the GMAT ESR.
What is a GMAT ENhanced score report?
After you take the GMAT exam, you can pay an additional $30 to see your Enhanced Score Report (ESR). This document provides additional information and statistics about your GMAT test performance. While you’ll never know every detail of what occurred during your GMAT (...did you get that one tricky rates question right? Sadly, there’s no way to know for sure), the ESR can provide some valuable insight into what happened during your GMAT exam.
Some of the information in the GMAT ESR is presented in a confusing or un-intuitive way. Although we’re still not sure why the GMAC goes to such great lengths to bury helpful information beneath seemingly meaningless layers of statistics, many years of GMAT tutoring experience have shown us that the following are the best things to look for as you analyze your ESR.
LOok for Bad Starts and Finishes in your ESR
The first step in analyzing your GMAT ESR is to check for bad starts and bad finishes. The “Performance Over Time” section of both Quant and Verbal can show you if you missed a disproportionate number of questions in the first or last part of a GMAT exam section.
This analysis can help you make improvements before your next GMAT exam. Imagine that the first quarter of your first GMAT section was a disaster; maybe you could incorporate warm-up problems before your next attempt. Or maybe your performance faded at the end of your final GMAT section -- that could mean that you either need to study for the GMAT in a way that builds your stamina, or rearrange the order of your GMAT sections.
Inconsistent Timing Across Quarters in Your ESR
After checking for bad starts and bad finishes, the “Time Management” section of your GMAT ESR can tell you whether you managed your time well for the duration of the exam.
If your average time per response in the “Performance Over Time” section gets shorter from quarter to quarter, you probably spent too much time on questions early in that GMAT test section.
For more, check out this video on how to manage your time on the GMAT.
Time Spent on GMAT Questions Answered Incorrectly
The next thing to look for in your GMAT ESR is the time you spent on questions that you ended up getting incorrect.
If the purple section of your “Performance Over Time” pie chart is greater than 50%, then you likely spent way too much time on a GMAT question that you ended up missing. Remember that question where you spent six minutes trying to figure out which side of a 30-60-90 triangle was x√3? Yeah, you missed it anyway.
If you had timing issues on your GMAT exam, you probably already knew it. But your ESR can confirm your hypothesis and deepen your understanding of where things went wrong with your timing.
Anomalies in Average Difficulty on your ESR
As we tell our GMAT students all the time, sloppy errors can destroy your GMAT score. For better or worse, those errors often show up on your GMAT ESR.
In the section entitled ”Average Difficulty”, there’s a line graph with greenish, a blue, and a purple lines. If you got all the easy questions right (as you should!) and you just missed some hard ones, then the purple line should remain above the green and blue lines.
But if the purple line dips below the blue and green lines at any point, you missed at least one really easy GMAT question. If that’s the case, you could learn all of the GMAT content in the world from the best GMAT tutors in the world, but your GMAT score won’t consistently improve until you eliminate those careless errors -- and the best GMAT tutors will tell you that.
Major Differences by GMAT Question Type
The final thing to look for when analyzing your GMAT ESR is whether you encounter particular difficulty with certain question types.
It can be remarkably easy to overreact to this data. If your performance by percentile shows only minor differences by GMAT question type, then you can probably ignore it, mostly because the data on individual question types is derived from just a few questions (more on that below). But if you’re seeing HUGE differences in your performance by question type (e.g. CR, RC, or SC; DS or PS), it can potentially help guide your GMAT studies.
How the GMAT ESR is NOT Useful
While your GMAT ESR can show you some valuable things about your performance, it can’t show you everything.
For starters, the GMAT ESR does NOT show you any actual GMAT questions. Sorry for the bad news.
And as we mentioned above, the “Performance by Fundamental Skills” section and “Sub-Section Rankings” can be particularly dubious. The sample size is so small that any conclusions that could be drawn would be questionable.
For example, the GMAT quant questions are divided into six “fundamental skills” areas on the ESR -- so it’s possible that the data is based on as few as three or four questions. So take that information with a grain of salt.
Beyond that, the GMAT ESR offers little guidance about what, exactly, the “fundamental skills” mean. For example, the GMAT ESR lists two different Sentence Correction question types: Grammar and Communication. Since grammar is fundamentally part of “communication” -- and since most GMAT Sentence Correction questions require test-takers to think about both grammar and the nuances of meaning -- it’s unclear what distinguishes a “grammar question” from a “communication question.”
The GMAT ESR also omits any data on experimental questions. On the GMAT you’ll always see three experimental quant questions and six experimental verbal questions that do not count toward your GMAT score. These experimental questions do not directly factor into any of the data that shows up on your GMAT ESR.
Finally, while the GMAT ESR may give you some insight into the types of GMAT questions you missed, it rarely gives you information on why you missed those questions. For example, the GMAT ESR may show that you had timing issues on quant, but unless you remember specifically what happened, those timing issues could have been caused by any number of factors: you may have been stubborn on a particular GMAT question, anxiety may have set in, or you may have been solving questions inefficiently throughout the quant section.
For more on how to analyze GMAT Enhanced Score Reports, check out this video: