I've been analyzing through many ESR reports (scores ranging from 480 to the upper 700s) on GMATclub, and this is what I observed:
For Quant: The average question difficulty appears to be
medium-medium high (based from the ESR reports), depending on how the test maker is doing. Generally, if the test maker did well in the first quarter, the difficulty tends to jump from Medium to Medium-High and levels off throughout the 3rd and 4th quarter of the exam. While I know that missing an easy question, even on the later quarters on the exam, hurts your score more than missing a hard question, in order to even have a chance to get the "hard" questions he/she has to answer the easy/medium questions correctly. (I believe the ESR proves how important doing well in the first quarter is crucial for a high score, more information on that, check out
https://gmatclub.com/forum/new-format-g ... 69682.html) Even for test-takers who score a Q49-Q51, the average difficulty per section doesn't change much, based on the ESR difficulty. (That will lead to a couple of questions later in this post)
For Verbal: The average question difficulty appears to be
medium to medium-high on rare occasions. It appears that the GMAT tends to rate the average verbal questions difficulty less than the difficulty in the Quant Section. Maybe this is one of the reasons why you can generally miss more Quant questions and still score a +Q48 out of Q51, but missing a few question on Verbal drops a V51 to V40 or even less because the GMAT considers Verbal questions to be "easier" (based on the ESR reports) than Quant so you have a higher penalty for missing a question?
(If anyone has any observations/comments on the ESR difficulty, please feel free to share!!!)
Now I have a few questions:1.) Based on the ESR difficulty, does the GMAT generally test you on mostly easy/medium questions, then occasionally test you on "hard" questions throughout the exam? Because if the GMAT gave a test-taker all bunch of "hard" questions after he/she did well in the first quarter of the exam, then I would assume the difficulty in those later quarters will be closer to high, and not medium-high (unless the GMAT underestimates the difficulty of the questions that are given??).
Similar to GMAT prep exam 1 and 2, generally the bulk is mostly easy/medium questions (based on GMATclub's difficulty), and if you're doing well in the first quarter, you'll still get "medium" questions, but the software will give you a few hard questions. However, exam 3-6, there are less hard questions in the question pack, so the average difficulty will be less (the exam will give you even more easy/medium question but even fewer harder questions than GMAT prep exam 1/2), but the test-taker will have less room for error because even a couple of wrong answers on easy/medium question damage your score. Based on the forums, the actual GMAT exam probably coincides more closely to GMATprep 1 and 2 because the GMAT will have a much larger question pool to give a test-taker harder questions (assuming the test taker is doing well). Maybe this is why people who are prepping for the GMAT should focus on fundamentals, then nailing the easier/medium questions from the
OG guide rather than just practicing super-tough GMAT questions, because the bulk of the exam is those easy/medium questions? So if you don't have the consistency of answering those easy/medium questions, you'll never have the opportunity to attempt those "hard" questions.
2.) Or is the GMAT grossly underestimating the question difficulty on its ESR reports? Can anyone who scored well on either the quant or the verbal section (or both) give insight on how the question difficulty on the actual test compared to the difficulty from the
OG guides and GMATprep questions difficulty on GMATclub?
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25 Sep 2019, 20:10
