Difficulty level of questions

Hello, Nis20. I know for a fact that you do not need to put in a stellar performance on Hard questions to cross the 700 threshold. In fact, I have helped many students achieve 730+ scores by advising them to focus more on Easy and Medium questions. The GMAT™ is a test that punishes mistakes on lower-level questions more than it rewards accuracy on upper-level questions. In fact, I set up a tiered accuracy system for performance benchmarking that all but guarantees a 700+ score (provided you hit the benchmarks):

Easy—90 percent or greater
Medium—80 percent or greater
Hard—60 percent or greater

Basically, you are playing the probabilities that for a given type of question, you will succeed more often than not. By focusing on fundamentals, you will grow in confidence, and your performance will improve on harder questions as well. It is a win-win proposition.

Take some pressure off yourself. I sometimes even give my students one "free pass" for each cluster of five questions, a question they are allowed to guess on if it looks out of their depth. When you can break each section down into manageable chunks and give yourself a psychological edge in each mini-cluster of questions, you can put in your best performance.

Good luck with your studies.

- Andrew

This was helpful. Thank you!!

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Hi Nis20,

Many GMATers become too fixated on the 'implied level' of the questions that they're working on - instead of what really matters: defining WHY they're getting questions wrong and becoming more efficient at approaching the overall Exam. To answer your immediate question though - Yes, you can score 700+ without correctly answering any of the 'hard' questions.

Since it sounds like you're just beginning your studies, then it would be a good idea to take a FULL-LENGTH practice CAT Test; you can access 2 for free at www.mba.com (and they come with some additional practice materials). If you want to do a little studying first, so that you can familiarize yourself with the basic content and question types, then that's okay - but you shouldn't wait too long to take that initial CAT. That score will give us a good sense of your natural strengths and weaknesses and will help provide a basis for comparison as you continue to study. A FULL CAT takes about 3.5 hours to complete, so make sure that you've set aside enough time to take it in one sitting. Once you have that Score, you should report back here and we can come up with a study plan.

I'd like to know a bit more about your timeline and goals:
1) What is your goal score?
2) When are you planning to take the GMAT?
3) When are you planning to apply to Business School and what Schools are you planning to apply to?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Hi Nis20,

Let me share my insights on this.

For scoring 700 and above, you need to get the easy medium questions right as GMAT test is adaptive in nature. You have to make the GMAT algorithm serve you difficult questions and get them right as well. If you don’t answer the hard questions correctly, you might probably end up struggling to score 700+. Also, it’s important to note that accuracy isn’t the most important thing. You can have an overall accuracy of 80% and still have a below 700 score.

What matters is Skill level for which you need to have a clear understanding of how the GMAT algorithm works. Here’s a video which might help you understand better:


You may also find this article useful:

https://blog.gmatwhiz.com/accuracy-vs-ability-in-gmat/

Feel free to reach out to me in case you have any more queries.

Hi Nis20,

Have you taken an official practice test yet? That would be the best way to check how close you are to 700.