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18 Nov 2011, 17:00
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runitback
I'm going to take a stab at this based on my meager experiences with the GMAT, GMATprep, and OG.
My thought on this is that pretty much all of the questions you will find on the GMAT can easily be solved in 2 minutes, or max 2.5 minutes - but that is once you realize HOW to solve it. The tricksy thing with advanced level questions (and i'm talking about quant here) is that they are written in a more devious manner. For example they might incorporate multiple topics or subject matters, they will have more traps, and word problems will be harder to 'decode' so to speak. The actual calculations are generally no more difficult than lower level questions, but figuring out how to solve the problem and separating out the different parts of the problem is what makes them tougher. The main thing is that you have to be learn to just wing it when you see a problem that doesn't look familiar, and that takes practice - especially for someone like me who doesn't have a strong quantitative background.
The other key thing is that you have to be very effective in managing your time. I said all problems can be solved in around 2 minutes, but it is VERY easy to sit there going in circles around a problem you don't understand. Its natural to want to get every question right, but in a case like that you HAVE to make a guess. Take a stab or two at the question, if you still don't get it, eliminate any answer choices you can and make a guess. So if after about a minute, you aren't sure that you're on track to come up with the right answer, move on because it isn't worth it to waste more time at the risk of sacrificing questions you do know how to answer.
17 Dec 2011, 11:19
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Thank you, Hjort!
It is really usefull to understand how GMAT scores work. I have a question: How many levels of dificulty exist? As we assume that there is x level as the average one, how many steps till 700+ there are? What is the easiest question's level?
Lol, we become smarter as 'the center of the distribution increased about 150 points from 550 to 700".
Regards,
It is really usefull to understand how GMAT scores work. I have a question: How many levels of dificulty exist? As we assume that there is x level as the average one, how many steps till 700+ there are? What is the easiest question's level?
Lol, we become smarter as 'the center of the distribution increased about 150 points from 550 to 700".
Regards,
17 Dec 2011, 18:30
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ellenika
There are not specific "levels" of difficulty; question difficulty is graded on a continuous scale. The difficulty values are actually in a range from about -2.5 to 2.5 inside the scoring algorithm (these correspond to standard deviations above or below average), so one very hard question might have a difficulty value of 2.314, and another fairly easy one might have a difficulty value of -0.613. When books talk about "700-level questions", they really just mean a "hard question"; that's not the way the algorithm classifies questions.
It's also impossible to say how many 'steps' there are before you reach 700+ type questions. A scoring algorithm like the one used on the GMAT works perfectly well if the steps are small at the start of the test, or if they're large - it makes no difference to the integrity of the scoring. So they're free to set that 'step size' however they like, and it could very well be different from one test to another.
