Confusing scoring

[priyankur.saha]

Today when I was reviewing my past quant tests I found that same question in Word Translation problem set has ascribed two diffculty levels. Even solution for both the questions is same.

Question name is "Apples and Oranges" and difficulty levels are 700-800 and 600-700 in two different tests!!

[JonathanSchneider]

Hm.. very strange. Thanks for pointing this out. I'll let the appropriate parties know : )

[StaceyKoprince]

When we initially post new questions, we assign what we think should be the proper difficulty (in 100-point increments). After enough people have done the question, we go back and calculate a more precise difficulty (10-point increments) based upon how people actually did with that question.

Note that the change may not have been as large as you think. If the old level were 700-800, the new level might be 680 or 690, which is pretty darn close to our original estimate at one end of the scale. It shows up to you as a drop to 600-700 level, but that doesn't mean it was a 100-point drop.