I was idly browsing on a university web site the other day, and answering their entrance test questions. I did all right until I got to "identify this scale". It was like C melodic minor but with the going up notes written going down, ie C B A G F Eb D C.

Any ideas? It's stumped all those I've asked so far - the nearest we've got is "some sort of weird jazz scale"

Yeah, just a C melodic minor scale, ascending form. But actually descending.

Either form of the melodic minor scale can be used descending or ascending in actual music, but it does seem weird that they would give you the ascending form descending in a theoretical question. The only other name I have heard for this scale is "jazz minor" (meaning melodic minor ascending form only, whether the scale is actually ascending or descending). That could be what they're looking for, I suppose, but I think it's unlikely.

Do you have a link?

Sometimes in jazz it's called the minor major scale. Or at any rate the minor major arpeggio in that key would be C Eb G B ©. A very nice sound!

When jazzers talk about the melodic minor they tend to mean the ascending form played both up and down - that's how I practice mine. The reason is that the descending form is a mode of the major scale, so you cover that when you do your major scales and modesm and the functional harmony is included with major scale functional harmony.

The ascending form of the melodic minor scale can be used as Violinia says on minor major 7th chords. The 4th mode is a "lydian dominant" and you can play it over dominant seventh chords, especially where they are secondary dominants. The 7th mode is the altered scale or diminished whole-tone scale and you can play it over altered chords (7th chords where pretty much all of the extensions are altered, i.e. b9, #9, #11, b13).