confused with the difficulty level....

Dear mvictor,
I'm happy to respond.

My friend, yes, in an ideal theoretical world, the Q and V sections of the GMAT would be scaled the same, and a scaled score of 40 on one would mean exactly the same thing as it did on the other. Yes, that would be true in some utopian situation, but for a number of reasons, that's just not how the GMAT works.

Part of the asymmetry has to do with the test taking pool. Many more people can excel in math than can excel in the verbal. After all, if one is fluent in high school math, that's essentially all the math one needs for the GMAT, whereas the level for the verbal is comparable to some of the most sophisticated writing in print.

Part, though, is a fundamental asymmetry between mathematics and verbal material in their essence. Math is black and white. For any GMAT math problem, no matter how hard, there is just one unambiguous answer. The other experts and I usually are able to solve any math problem right away, and if any of makes a mistake, it is immediately corrected by another expert, and then everything's clear. There's simply no ambiguity.

Verbal material, by its very nature, involves shades of grey. My colleagues at Magoosh and I can get into fabulous long discussions about the subtleties of individual verbal questions. At times, I will engage other experts here on GC in debates on verbal questions. There's room for all kinds of differences of opinion. Now, the GMAT official questions are superb in presenting verbal questions in which most experts would agree that one answer choice is clearly right and the other four are clearly wrong. It's very hard to write crystal clear verbal questions, and all the official verbal questions are superb. By contrast, it's relatively easy to write math practice questions. By my own estimate, I would say that probably about 95% of the non-official math practice questions are GC are high quality questions, good enough to appear on the GMAT, but I would say that only about 25% of the non-official verbal practice questions achieve that same level of excellence.

Thus, by its very nature, it's harder to achieve mastery on the Verbal section. Thus, if someone achieves a verbal subscore of about 30, they are already getting into top 10% territory, which is the rough equivalent of a 700 score.

Does all this make sense?
Mike