Breakdown of Official Guide 13th Edition vs. 12th Edition

Dear Jerembo,

I'm actually the one who compiled these question for the Excel document that my esteemed colleague Margarette posted.

I haven't done a formal study of each and every new question in the OG 13, but here's what I can say from my overall sense of the questions. Maybe about 1/3 of them at most, while new in superficial presentation, are clearly a reworking of either a dropped question in the OG12 or an earlier question --- in this case there has been just a slight change in emphasis. The others, though, are quite new, both in terms of content and in terms of format; that's the vast majority of the new questions. As a token example --- OG 13 PS #199 --- there is NOTHING like that in any previous released question that I have seen. That is a completely and unapologetically NEW question.

I discussed, very briefly, some of the trends I noticed in the new math questions in this post:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2012/sneak-peek ... tion-math/

Now, does knowing all this help you at all as a test-taker? I don't know. If you are just coming to the GMAT now, and you have bought the OG13 and are studying with current materials, then how the GMAT was in all its previous iterations really doesn't matter ---- in fact, it's entirely irrelevant to your current GMAT preparation process. If you bought an OG12 when you started studying, and now have an OG 13, and want to know the changes, it would be convenient to see which questions are new --- that's precisely why we posted this spreadsheet. If you have been following the GMAT assiduously for years as it has developed and changed as a test, you might be more interested in the logic behind these changes and the larger trends over time, but I think that situation applies far more to those of us who work in the test prep business, and relatively rarely to an individual test-taker out there. From what I have seen, most people go from the beginning of studying to their final sitting for the exam in well under a year: I believe few people outside of the test prep business have paid consistent attention to the GMAT over the course of several years. That's really a perspective beyond what the average GMAT test taker has or needs.

Does all this make sense?

Mike