Hardest Verbal Questions Tested on the GMAT Prep Software

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