Hey all, bare with me (lol)

I know the MGMATs are adaptive but I was a little confused about the way my last two practice MGMATs were scored. On my first exam, I received a quant score of 37 having tackled mostly 500-600/600-700 level questions and always getting 700-800 level questions (which were plentiful) wrong and also getting all 300-500 level questions right.

Then my second practice exam I started off poorly and was given a bunch of 300-500 level questions during set 10-20 which I answered correctly, given a few 500-600 questions which I got right on and off and then was hardly given any 700-800 questions and ended up with a quant score of 40. Is this how the real GMAT works too? I guess I was thinking the harder exam with mostly 700-800 questions would have gotten me more points. Can you really recoop throughout the exam? I was also psyching myself out during the quant because I was getting easy questions and was almost sure I was doing done poorly.

Thanks in advance.

Nope, you can have a test on which you are given more 700-800 level questions and still get a lower score!

The score is not based on any kind of an average performance throughout the section. The score is simply whatever level you are at when the section ends. For example, I once took the test and spent all of my time trying to get the first 23 questions right and then left the last 14 questions blank. I normally score in the 99th percentile, so I got a lot of very hard questions for those first 23, and got a lot of them right. Guess what my score was? 52nd percentile - because that's where the algorithm was after 14 blank questions - at a 52!

So, you can absolutely recover - and you can also be doing really well and then run out of time or have a bad patch at the end and tank your score, even after doing really well for most of the test.