Best Sources for CR & RC

Fame,

With all that rating in separate categories, you are asking for a level of picayune specificity that, in my view, transcends any useful preparation. It's a left-brain fantasy that you can have a better idea how to achieve success by having a more maniacally detailed map of the terrain. Success on the GMAT, like success in many area of the business world and of life in general, is largely holistic, involving at least as much right-brain as left. I am going to ignore this part of the question.

First, I am going share this post:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2013/best-gmat- ... rces-2013/

Overall, I would say the two sources I would recommend most highly for all GMAT questions, all categories and difficulty levels, are MGMAT and Magoosh. I have seen many truly atrocious questions from other prep sources. A dirty secret is --- many GMAT prep sources contract out with third parties for question creation --- that is, they don't make their own questions, and they don't have in place a process for quality assurance and ongoing critique. I know nothing about MGMAT's internal process, but I know they have a large collection of folks who know a ton about the GMAT, and they write their own questions ---- these questions are consistently good, so they must have some amazing process in place. At Magoosh, we write our own questions, subjecting them to a rigorous review process before release, and then monitoring the quality of each question once it is released. Most GMAT prep sources do not put this level of effort into question quality ---- and, frankly, it shows.

You said, "excluding OG", but I would hasten to point out ---- for higher level CR practice, I would strongly recommend the LSAT OG and any official material from the LSAT. The LSAT is also not a bad source for further RC practice. The GRE OG would be another excellent source for RC --- GRE RC is at least as hard, if not a little harder, than GMAT RC.

For both of these questions, also, I think some of the best preparation has nothing to do with test prep material. If you are committed to becoming an CR and/or RC expert, then it is sheer folly not to read The Economist magazine cover-to-cover every week, as well as substantial portions of the Wall Street Journal each day. Ultimately, the very reason the GMAT is testing stuff like CR & RC is because you are going to have to make sense of the facts & arguments presented in sources such as these. I think all this worry about 600-level vs. 700-level questions is barking up the wrong tree. Throw yourself into wrestling with real world political & economic issues in all their complexity and messiness. If you can get to the point that you see to the core of arguments in that context, then the GMAT CR would be a cakewalk by comparison.

That's my 2¢
Mike