Help GMAT Club Decide: How to Determine RC Difficulty

Question

RC Timer Difficulty

Dear RC Forum members,

We will be adding RC question difficulty to the individual RC questions.  
However, one question exists how do we handle the overall RC passage difficulty and esp tags. There are a few possible answers:

We can use average difficulty per passage 
  We can create tags such as 3x Hard, 2x Easy, and 2x Medium and tagging passages with these tags based on how many Hard, Easy, and Medium questions  
  Not have overall passage difficulty (but then you can't use tags in this case) 
  Don't have any overall difficulty 
  Other ideas and suggestions?

What do you think? 
Should we do anything about the OVERALL difficulty or just worry about individual?

This topic will be open for at least 3 weeks to let e we gone chime in. Thank you!

Sajjad1994 · Answer

Thank you  bb  for initiating this, My vote goes for the first point that is the average method. The second option is also a good one and can be a potential to implement but I think first option is better of all.

Nipungupta9081 · Answer

i'll go with 1st option bb Also can we have a timer for RC passages as a whole like we have for Individual Questions? Can we make RC texts loook bigger just like we get in GMAT Offline?

ShankSouljaBoi · Answer

Option 1.

Please upload hard official LSAT and Official GRE passages in SCIENCE (We really lack good Biology and Marine related passages), BUSINESS, and Social Science . They are very few or maybe I am done with all of them

bb  request you to ask  carcass  to upload official GRE RC and LSAT RC here !!!!!

bb · Answer

Thank you!

Can you please clarify what you mean by make them bigger?

Thanks!

Posted from my mobile device

yashikaaggarwal · Answer

Can we put passage reading timer for the RC question as well? Its quiet difficult to comprehend time along with solving questions?

Other than that, I guess we need a more elaborated answers or the official solution for the problems. There are discussion for some particular questions, but not really have any standard parameter to evaluate the understanding of one's passage. Can we work on RC solutions too?

Posted from my mobile device

bM22 · Answer

Hi  bb ,

Great initiative, as we have lately seen a lot of posts asking for the difficulty level of each question. I would prefer option 1 to handle the overall RC passage difficulty, but would the length or the ease in reading of the passages be a part of this average as sometimes the passages can be easy and questions difficult and vice versa or the average would be based just on the level of questions.

Thanks.

bb · Answer

Thank you. Whatever methodology we come up with, it would need to be driven by numbers. So average difficulty of the passage would be just taking all the questions and averaging a difficulty. Unless there is a way to come up with measuring difficulty of the actual passage. If not it would be the average of all questions difficulties.

Posted from my mobile device

bM22 · Answer

Oh, so would it possible to have a separate tag for the level of the passage and a separate tag of average of overall difficulty of the questions. Like currently we have tags as Long passage, short passage, similarly if tags for the read of the passage could be introduced, and the user who posts can add those as tag as well. As in that case, even if that tag doesn't have a number, it could still show the level whether passage was a hard or an easy read. Not sure if that is possible.

Thanks.

AnirudhaS · Answer

Hi  bb  I was just about to suggest what  bm2201  suggested above - 
 "separate tag for the level of the passage and a separate tag of average of overall difficulty of the questions"

I can only talk about myself and I found out that with abstract/harder to comprehend passages, I needed some sort of note taking strategies - more of a mind map. And currently we do not have the means to filter these passages out in GC.

Also regarding the difficulty level of passages, I think it should not be a simple average of the numbers. Rather some sort of logic should be there, for example - a passage is 700+ level if it has more than three 700 level questions. This will filter out oddities and dodgy questions skewing the RC in a particular group.

yashikaaggarwal  regarding passage timer, what I do is start the timer of the first question while I am reading the passage. This works fairly well for me. I think the problem if we do implement reading timers is that it 'stands out' in the error log.

One more point regarding formatting, RC formatting is not ideal. We need to implement a system where we can give line breaks. And also we need a separate column entry for line numbers. I do not think I explained myself clearly, but what I am trying to say is the line numbers should not with the text. Further to the formatting, the iOS app RC formatting does not work well - the questions appear after the passage.

pemathew · Answer

I would prefer option 1.

Also, in GMAT Club's RCs, once a question is answered the result is shown before one moves into next question. Knowing the result of the question that one has just answered do influence accuracy while attempting remaining questions.
It would be great if there is a toggle button, which when turned on will enable one to see the results only after attempting all the questions of a RC.

yashikaaggarwal · Answer

I think the question difficulty level should be selected as per the accuracy of answering one question because sometimes the difficulty level doesn't justify the question. for instance - in the attachment below, the difficulty level should be 700+ given only 16% were able to get the answer right.
For starters, we can put the difficulty level tag according to the given passage source, and alter its tag later according to the average accuracy of all questions.

bb · Answer

Sorry, I have gotten a bit distracted with the Master's Spotlight (feverishly looking for other excuses)

I think this is a good suggestion to add to the RC forum, not showing the answers until all questions have been answered. I will need to check with our developers to see if this is possible, I am sure we can figure something out....

Help GMAT Club Decide: How to Determine RC Difficulty

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