Types of Questions and Difficulty Tested on the GMAT/GMAT Prep

Last week we were taking a look at What Quant is Tested on the GMAT and this week, it is Verbal time!
One comment before we dive in, this is analysis of the GMAT Prep Tests 1 and 2. These are 2 free tests that have proven to be the absolute best predictors of the GMAT score... The 2 free tests are a great indicator and actually a much more accurate predictor of the score because they contain close to 2,000 questions. There are 530 SC and 313 CR questions that I have used to analyze information about question types, difficulty, and what is tested. Please note that while there are 843 questions, there are actually 1,306 topics that are tested based on the verbal question tags (some questions had multiple tags, esp the SC questions)

First of all, the harder type of questions on the GMAT are the CR questions. Only 38% CR's are easy while 45 of SC's are easy. You can see the exact split of easy, medium, and hard SC and CR questions below:




What Topics Are Common on the Sentence Correction in GMAT Prep?
Which Grammar topics should you spend more time on? We all know that prep companies try to devise methods for a variety of topics but what is actually tested vs. what is taught?




What are the Easier Topics and which are Harder SC Topics?


(the dotted line represents the average difficulty of about 25%


CR Topics:


You can spot that Must be True, Bold Face, Numbers & Percents (a rare category), as well as Method of Reasoning (another rare category), have almost ZERO Easy questions.


Likelihood of Encounter by Topic
Interesting enough, there are topics that you MUST master in order to bump your score and those are the Strengthen/Weakne, Assumption, and Bold Face. No way around them - this group is almost 60% of ALL CR Questions!



SC does not have as big of a dominant group but the Top 5 represent 50% of all Questions: Modifiers, Parallel Structure, Comparisons, Idioms, and Grammatic Construction (somewhat catch-all bucket)



Bottom Line:
Compared to Quant, the picture with Verbal is clearer in terms of the question types you will encounter and the topics that are considered "hard" and have a greater portion of those questions.

• Sentence Correction (SC)
  
  • With about 12 SC questions, you will definitely want to make sure you are solid in Modifiers, Parallel Construction rules, and comparisons. Surprisingly Subject-Verb agreement is not as prevalent and neither is Meaning on the GMAT Prep. There are 81 questions marked as Idioms and that's something to be aware!
  • If you are scoring 30+ in SC and looking to improve topics that are tested on higher levels, you need to focus on the harder SC question types such as Meaning, such as/like which/that, and a little-known topic Absolute Phrase
• Critical Reasoning (CR)
  
  • The key to getting anywhere on the board with CR is to have the basics tackled - Strengthen/Weaken and Assumption questions represent 50% of the CR question bank in GMAT Prep! Half of your questions will be this type (they are all really assumption questions since S/W requires assumption understanding). Make sure you do have a good approach and practice under your belt
  • The hardest CR questions are Must be True, Bold Face (of course), and surprisingly Questions that have to do with Numbers.

Let me know what questions you have
BB



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This post acted like a confidence booster for me. Thanks a lot bb for putting this up. After knowing the likelihood of absolute phrases concept on SC I am a little relieved because that topic is giving me a really hard time.

Good luck!
P.S. There is a nice post by Marcab that explains how to deal with Absolute Phrases: https://gmatclub.com/forum/with-surface ... l#p1148221
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Thanks a lot bb for the analysis. It will really help before digging into the practice tests. Can u throw some insight over the similarity between hard questions from GMAT prep and Official GMAT guide questions??
Thanks a lot!!!

Posted from my mobile device

I have not done that analysis yet. I have a few ideas where to take this if this topic is popular enough. I can look at the exam packs and test three and four verses one and two and also compare tests three and four verses five and six. We can also look at official guide versus GMAT prep. There’s a lot of data crunching we can do but it takes a long time to clean the data and format It nicely. It all takes time
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Ya it's time consuming task. Thanks though brother. It is quite a work you have done.
I could help in some way. 🙂👏👏👏👏

Posted from my mobile device

Thank you! If you have decent excel or data analysis skills, you can do the analysis of the OG 2021 by accessing the error log here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... 1125727705 - it has all the tags and difficulty in it, so you can access it and work on it - make a copy and the key task is to split the tags so that you only have 1 tag per cell (I also copy the whole line with each tag so that I also have difficulty and type) and then do a Pivot so that you can get the data summarized by tag/topic and by difficulty. You may know how to do this in a better than than I can... my way seems slow . If not, I can get to it next week.
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Cool...I will try on this weekend..👍😎

Posted from my mobile device

Have you gotten anywhere with the OG comparison?
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Yup... started working on it...got busy with other engagement along with it.... hopefully share the work asap🤞😎

Thanks! If not, I can do it over the weekend and post it on Monday.
Thx.
BB
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Thank you for this. Can you do something similar to this for people who find quant challenging?

Yes... there is a link in the very first line of the very first post at the very top. 😢

Posted from my mobile device
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