GMAT 720 -> 660 . Is the GMAT becoming much more vocubulary based ?

Hi RPSingh18.

I doubt that the GMAT has changed radically in the past six months, and, given what the GMAT is meant to test, I doubt that it would ever emphasize vocabulary. At the same time, obviously GMAC has multiple people writing questions, and the people writing questions for GMAC change over time. So, probably some writers tend to use uncommon words more than other writers do, and some questions use words that you aren't familiar with. Meanwhile, probably, other writers and other questions use words with which you are more familiar.

So, part of what you experienced was probably just the luck of the draw, and it could very well be that, if you were to take the GMAT again, you would see questions that use vocabulary with which you are more familiar.

Also, for many non-native speakers of English, a key skill to have when taking a standardized test, such as the GMAT, is figuring out how to answer questions without fully understanding the vocabulary words they contain.

So, if you were to take the GMAT and get a different set of questions and, perhaps, hack your way to correct answers to a few that contain vocabulary with which you are not familiar, you could conceivably score much higher than you did on your last test.

Regarding your friends who scored lower on the real test than they did on mocks, doing so is fairly common, but not a sign that the GMAT has changed to requiring greater knowledge of vocabulary. There are multiple reasons for such discrepancies in performance, including that, in GMAT prep resources, forums, and mocks, many of the same patterns are discussed and employed, and so, people score high on mocks by using the patterns they have learned rather than by using the logical skills that the GMAT actually tests. Then, when they take the actual GMAT and see questions that don't match the patterns with which they are familiar, they don't score as high as they have on mocks.

So, my take is that, while, sure, it's possible that a non-native test-taker could somehow in taking the GMAT draw a set of questions with an unusually high number of uncommon words in them and, thus, achieve a score that is not fully representative of that person's skills, in most cases, test-takers reasonably well-versed in English should be able to achieve GMAT scores commensurate with their skills.