Experts' Topic of the Week, 7/7/17: Get 4 new, “fake” GMATPrep tests!

GMATNinja

I have edited the main post as per shorter format, added revised timing strategies by bb
and a link for the external stopwatch.

An additional query:

You quoted:


Can I revisit the question packs in below form too:
1) If your average verbal score is below 30, select ONLY easy and medium questions, for all three question types (CR, RC, and SC). This step is especially important for the verbal section, so make sure to select the highest number possible in each of the six dropdowns (since the number in hard tabs shall now be 0).

Does this strategy help anyone as much as yours?
I think the biggest advantage of these fake mocks to know time spent per question and how my mock is paced throughout an hour,
an inference I can not deduce from an updated version of exam packs.

Hi All,
I am particularly asking this to moderators and test takers in India, can we get the GMAT-style test booklet and marker which GMATNinja mentions in this post locally here (at a cheaper cost); to buy this set at 17 USD (1,200 INR) doesn't look worth

The reason I want to buy this is I have seen many test-takers (also me) suffer while using this on the test day (MAYBE we are not habituated to use these weird markers and super big booklets)

You can make one on your own (the noteboard, not the marker ). But what problems did you face on test day? Did your markers run dry?

Yea the markers were quite bad.. It was as if we were expected to not keep the lid open for longer.. however, the markers used to stop working even after the lid was kept open for a minute or two.. and they were those thick markers.. using which the notes were also illegible.. even after requesting additional mrkers, the situation was the same.. Im surprised at the kind of stationary being provided after pying $250..

I should have done this a long time ago, but we’ve finally fully updated this to reflect the formatting in the online mba.com software, as well as the shorter GMAT exam. Enjoy!

GMATNinja bb Bunuel

Are the Gmat Pack Questions on GmatClub too? I am wondering if I should buy them, since I went through all the medium/hard OG tagged questions here on GmatClub. So I am not sure if I will simply face the same questions?

Please advise

Hi everyone,

Really nice post, as usual many thanks to GMATNinja !

What are your views regarding the difficulty of the questions from the 90 "offered questions" ?

My exam is in 3 days, I want to do 5PS/5DS/5CR/5SC to practice only with official questions without having to work a lot of hours (need to rest before the D-day), but I have the feeling that all the questions are really easy (when I search the questions on the forum, they are almost all in the sub-600 lvl section even for those defined as hard by GMAC).
I have exhausted almost all the questions with the tag "official questions" on the forum so that's why I am using the 90 questions offered.

Many thanks in advance for your help !

There are two GMAT Official Practice Questions 1 and 2. You said that 1 comes in exams 3-6, what about 2?

Also is there a way to do accurate resets of the exams and not get the same questions?

Hi yahya729,

Neither GMAT Official Practice Questions 1 nor GMAT Official Practice Questions 2 is part of any of the official practice test packs, including GMAT Official Practice Exams 3 to 6. All of these are separate products (3 to 6 is a bundle of GMAT Official Practice Exams 3 & 4 and GMAT Official Practice Exams 5 & 6).

Of course, there may be a bundle like the Premium GMAT Study Collection 2022 that includes multiple products.

would these bundles be better to get than official guide,verbal review or the advanced pack as these appear online and in the question bank vs having to open up a pdf? and otherwise the quality and relevance should similar?

GMATNinja

I have somewhat of a basic question. I am only seeing 40 math problems available for me, even though i have not used any of these questions yet (total of 90 unanswered aggregated). I HAVE used 1/2 and3/4 practice test bundles. Do these questions overlap?

Overall Im a bit confused on the difference between
1) questions available on the Wiley portalt
2) questions available for this fake test on this portal ^
3) questions in each separate practice test
4) questions in each "review book" (ex. Official Verbal Review Book, etc.)

Which of these overlap vs dont? How can I get the max number of unique questions? I am a bit lost since forums show that there is overlap and there seem to be multiple names for each test (ex. Gmat prep vs OG??)

Please help clarify!

A good first step would be to purchase and activate "GMAT Official Practice Questions 1" (for more details on this resource, check out the "What You'll Need" section of this post). Once you do that, you'll see nearly 500 available questions instead of just 90.

That's a good question about potential overlap of problems. The following are separate resources which do not overlap:

1) The GMAT Official Guide
2) The GMAT Verbal Review
3) The GMAT Quantitative Review
4) The 6 mba.com practice tests
5) GMAT Official Practice Questions 1
6) GMAT Official Practice Questions 2

I hope that helps!

Hey GMATNinja,

I have exhausted the 6 Official Practice Tests and was looking for additional mock exam material. Preferably, it would be official material owing to the importance of sticking to that for Verbal.

I came across this post and recognised the limitations of creating these fake tests using the Official Practice Questions pack (not adaptive, no score, etc.) but still found it to be a pretty a good deal, all things considered. So I went ahead and purchased it.

I followed the method you've described to the T (selected ALL available Verbal questions, etc.), but unfortunately, after I got my first RC question, the next one was an SC one :/ Reading the whole passage just to answer one question is obviously not a feasible way to take these fake tests. You mentioned that the question-type split won't be perfect over the set of the 36 questions, but I don't think this is supposed to happen.

The screenshots you've posted look different from what the software looks like now, do you know if perhaps there have been some changes in the functionality of the product as well, and that is why it's not working? Could I be missing something, is there any way to fix this?

I have my retake scheduled in 2 weeks and am in dire need of some Practice Tests. Would be grateful for your input, thank you

You aren't missing anything, and unfortunately, you're right -- the software changes implemented over the last couple years have pretty much rendered these "fake tests" obsolete, at least for the time being.

In the meantime, you're probably better off (1) redoing 1-2 of the 6 official tests (hopefully it's been a while since you've seen the first couple?) and (2) doing the official practice questions separately. You can try mixing DS and PS questions if you'd like, but mixing the verbal types doesn't seem to be working in any useful way.

Sorry for the not-so-great news!

A good option would be to reset and retake the two free official GMAC practice exams. Have you done that yet?

GMATNinja - Ahh, that sucks What's really shocking is that RC from the Question Pack doesn't seem to work fine even on its own, without any other question types selected - a different passage is presented in every question, so one-third of the Verbal content of the Question Pack is effectively unusable. At least the OG software got that right, even if it's equally useless in mixing RC with other types.

ScottTargetTestPrep - I have, unfortunately. I re-took Official Tests 1 and 2 approximately 11 and 9 months ago, respectively. Even though it's been some time since then, I suspect taking them a third time may not be very productive. What about Tests 3 and 4, do you think there's any benefit in retaking them? I know their question pools are smaller than 1 and 2, but I've taken them both only once, around 10-11 months ago.

So, then here is an important question. At this point, do you really need to take more practice tests given how many you've previously taken?