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GMAT Prep vs. Official Guide Quant Difficulty & Differences

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GMAT Prep vs. Official Guide Quant Difficulty & Differences [#permalink] New post  27 Jan 2021, 19:57
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GMAT Prep vs. The Official Guide Difficulty & Topics


A few weeks ago I have analyzed the GMAT Prep questions and their overall topic distribution and difficulty, and I wanted to compare how the GMAT prep tests compare to the latest version of the OG 2021. I have hit a few surprises I have to say.



Questions in the GMAT Prep vs. the OG 2021 and the results are interesting...

  • OG 2021 has significantly more Geometry than the GMAT Prep Software. GMAT Prep has HALF the number of Geometry questions (as a percentage of all questions)
  • OG 2021 has meaningfully more Word Problems than GMAT Prep
  • Both question sets appear to contain about the same portion of the hard questions - 22% with GMAT Prep having a lot more easy questions. GMAT prep has 270 hard questions and OG 2021 has 111 hard questions.
  • OG 21 has half the probability and combinations questions that the GMAT Prep has, which is a bit surprising
  • The difficulty of questions in the OG 21 is VERY proportionate. Basically, 20% of most question categories are Hard. Very different story with the GMAT Prep where some categories have as much as 50% of the questions in the Red. OG does not even have hard Probability questions :roll:


Attachment:
og vs gmatprep difficulty quant.png
og vs gmatprep difficulty quant.png [ 16.55 KiB | Viewed 5217 times ]



Distribution of Hard Questions by Topic and Source:
Attachment:
question-type-comparison OG 2021 vs OG.png
question-type-comparison OG 2021 vs OG.png [ 89.89 KiB | Viewed 5234 times ]



Take Aways:
  1. The two lists of questions are definitely not adding up. No argument about it
  2. The GMAT Prep database is from 7 years ago containing many of the older OG questions, while the OG 21 contains a number of new fresh questions that are added to the guides each year from past exams.
  3. Thus OG is likely more representative of the topics and questions tested on the GMAT TODAY than GMAT Prep.
  4. GMAT Prep is no longer AS representative of the topics tested on the real test as it was 7 tears ago as it fails to take into account any of the latest changes.
  5. While it seems topics are shifting and changing over time, the difficulty of the OG questions is not really representative of what one will encounter on the test either. OG 21 appears to be a sample of what's out there providing an even distribution of hard questions across the topics, but it does not appear to put any emphasis on specific topics, treating them equally.
  6. This makes the Official Guide a great source of topical practice since question distribution is so uniform (this we already knew)
  7. At the same time, you are likely to get a lot fewer Geometry and Word Problem questions on GMAT Prep than on the real test. Arithmetic and Number properties are not as fundamental as before either. Geometry and Word Problems appear to have become a bigger component of the test (in line with some of the feedback from test-takers). Now we have actual proof!


GMAT Prep:



Attachment:
OG2021 Quant Topics.png
OG2021 Quant Topics.png [ 170.43 KiB | Viewed 5197 times ]



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Re: GMAT Prep vs. Official Guide Quant Difficulty & Differences [#permalink] New post  28 Jan 2021, 18:37
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Wow, nice one bb! I got impressed

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Re: GMAT Prep vs. Official Guide Quant Difficulty & Differences [#permalink] New post  02 Feb 2021, 12:48
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plaverbach wrote:
Wow, nice one bb! I got impressed

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Thanks! I think we are a minority who gets excited about these kinds of stats.
I am going to do a bit more and pull the Verbal info this week. I am curious how it looks on the verbal side and I also dislike leaving things unfinished ;-)
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Re: GMAT Prep vs. Official Guide Quant Difficulty & Differences [#permalink] New post  13 Feb 2021, 01:28
Excellent work bb.. Great analysis..
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Re: GMAT Prep vs. Official Guide Quant Difficulty & Differences [#permalink] New post  06 May 2021, 15:32
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Also there is an analysis of the Verbal Topics here:

https://gmatclub.com/forum/hardest-verb ... 45076.html
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Re: GMAT Prep vs. Official Guide Quant Difficulty & Differences [#permalink] New post  14 Dec 2021, 12:36
Wow amazing work bb

Does this analysis include GMAT Prep Official Questions 1 & 2? Because I read that Official Questions #2 has a lot of recently retired questions.
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GMAT Prep vs. Official Guide Quant Difficulty & Differences [#permalink] New post  15 Dec 2021, 10:19
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jcaguirre91 wrote:
Wow amazing work bb

Does this analysis include GMAT Prep Official Questions 1 & 2? Because I read that Official Questions #2 has a lot of recently retired questions.


Hi. No, this is just the GMAT Prep Free Tests which have the lion share of questions.

By the way, Official Practice Questions #2 has a lot of old questions (75% or more) from old OG's unfortunately. I think that release had only a handful of new questions https://gmatclub.com/forum/gmac-announc ... l#p2552019 so whoever told you it is a new release does not really have the latest information :lol:
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GMAT Prep vs. Official Guide Quant Difficulty & Differences [#permalink]
15 Dec 2021, 10:19
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