GMAT Focus Algorithm - importance of the first 6 Questions is GONE

Thank you. I just grabbed an online "pricing" calculator and not sure I can integrate the classic test score but it is a nice idea.... 👍 It may be a different calculator. Let me try.

Very Good question. While taking the tests, I did not really notice much of a difference but let us be more scientific.
Let me compare my last GMAT Prep vs. Focus Tests. Here are the results between long and short passages.

	GMAT Classic	GMAT Focus
Short Passage (3 questions)	P1: 237 words P2: 228 words	P1: 202 words P2: 213 words
Long Passage (4 questions)	P1: 352 words P2: 360 words	P1: 384 words P2: 353 words

It looks like the shorter passages may be a bit shorter. I am seeing a small difference of about 10 words. That's 5% when you take a 200-word passage into consideration. However, that may be just a natural difference and I just happen to have shorter/longer passages. I am going to guess that the passages used on the Focus edition will come from the GMAT Classic edition. It will be too much work otherwise to create and redo all the questions and will be disruptive and costly to do, so my guess is the passages are interchangeable.

But would this mean that we are more likely to see shorter passages in the verbal section?
And I also wanted to understand if the question stem for CR has become smaller?

I am raising these doubts as I saw a YouTube video by a GMAT tutor reviewing the focus edition mocks where he stated the passages and question stems are smaller on the focus edition which makes retention, critical analysis and comprehension easier and faster

He drew an overall conclusion that on a difficulty scale if GMAT classic quant was 10/10 on difficulty then focus edition was 7/10

And if verbal was 10/10 then focus it was 6/10

I haven’t taken a mock yet because I’m not done studying all my topics, so I just want to know whatever he is saying is true or not?

Thanks bb

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Hi Focus7,

I would strongly urge you not to expect either RC or CR to change. For now, try to look at the verbal section of the Focus Edition as {current verbal - SC}. Of course, you can link to the video you mentioned if it contains any compelling evidence.

There’s no difference in the passage length it seems. During the gmat focus test, you can get a combination of short or long passages. You can also get all short passages or all long passages but usually it’s a combination.

I’m not sure if the Tutor who shared this information had measured the words and looked at every passage or if they just visually made this hypothesis.

Taking the GMAT prep focus edition, I did not notice a difference and I think my word counts also support that observation with evidence, although this is just one test with four passages and I think the two free tests probably have around 20 passages. Perhaps in the future there may be a change to verbal components but if we are to judge based on the information we have which is only the gmat prep test, then I would say reading comprehension and critical reasoning have generally stayed the same.

PS. It appears I may have a conversation with GMAC sometime next week about the test structure and components and I will inquire about this specific question but I would say there is more evidence to the contrary.

Thank you! Going to continue preparing like I’m giving the normal gmat minus sc and geometry!

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Here are some of the GMAC conversion tables if you are interested









Source:
https://blog.gmat.com/hubfs/section-sco ... anking.pdf
https://blog.gmat.com/hubfs/gmat-score- ... anking.pdf

How many RC passages one can expect in verbal section of Focus edition?

Will there be 3 passages with 4 questions each or 2 passages with 5+6 / 6+6 questions. any study on this??

I finished 2 free mocks.
With difference of only 1 mistake in total I could improve score my 70 points (595 to 665).

Can BrentTargetTestPrep bb GMATNinja help me understand how to score better from following comparison

Thank you for sharing! This is very interesting!

Unfortunate we can't really compare 1 mistake on the test - there are different sections and different difficulties of questions.

But here are some clues/things I have observed:
You left the last question unanswered. That has a HUGE impact on the Focus. You lost 4-5 points on that one.

The most interesting aspect to me is your DI performance and why it was so inconsistent. You got very different scores in Test 1 and Test 2. Did you take these sections in a different order? The only explanation for having such different scores on data insights is that you got an easier section in one case and the harder section in another which means these must’ve been taken second or third.


Because of your performance in the first section, your (second) section started with easier questions (fewer hard questions, means mistakes are more painful) which also caused your third section to start out easier as well and similarly carry s steep penalty for any mistake... 😥 (this is my understanding of the algorithm which is still evolving as I am taking more tests and have more data points).


In terms of how to score better, I have not run all the experiments yet to try different scenarios so I appreciate your example here. I don’t know what was the time between the two tests and why your performance on the data insights was so much better than one than the other…. I think that’s the biggest question.

Hi bb,

Thanks a lot for sharing your POV!

Let us know if need any help of us in gathering the data points. Planning to take focus edition so highly need to crack the code here.

Although i understand that one should focus on getting the max ques right instead of worrying lot about algo but i'm just curious to maximize ways to get the best.

Thank you. The most useful help would be with getting test results section by section. Also would be helpful to see the pattern of mistakes.

So if you take GMAT Focus GMAT Prep, please share your results

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Hi bb, thanks for the comment.


In both of mocks, my order was V then Q then DI.

V>Q>DI. So in first mock scoring low in V impacted me & gave easy questions in other section.

May be may I request you to run scenario with 6 mistakes in V & all questions correct in other section? Or something similar that can confirm hypothesis?

To me, Data Insights score probably depends a lot on Multi Source Reasoning, that is the most challenging part of this section, are there any differences in your MSR results between two mock tests?
I did well on MSR (5/6) but so bad on Data Sufficiency (1/5) and with a total 13/20 I ended up with an 81, which is a great score from my perspective.

Intresting, so is gmac considering MSR type questions as highest difficulty in comparison to others? In my case one of the tests I missed a complete MSR and two questions more (1 graph and 1 two part) but the score was 79 points. Although it depends on the difficulty of questions and sectional order but let's see how others see things!

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Hi folks, anyone has GMAT Focus booked.Would love to know dates/experiences!

Hi. We have a number of folks who already took it. You can see the debriefs here:
https://gmatclub.com/forum/search.php?s ... ag_id=1610

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