How best to use the OG

Hi aosho103,

Great question. As I tell our students at TTP, the OG can be great for practice AFTER completing our course since, at that point, our students have a very nice understanding of GMAT quant. Thus, the OG questions can be used to spot any knowledge gaps that need to be addressed.

Thus, a great way to use the OG questions is to set a timer for 20 minutes and attempt a set of 10 questions. After each set, spend a lot of time reviewing your wrong answers and see if, from those wrong answers, you can discover any previously unknown weak areas.

Hi aosho103,

The OG books are great sources for practice questions, but they're not designed to teach you Tactics, patterns or the little 'secrets' behind the GMAT - for those, you'll need Course-oriented materials. To that end, you might want to work on the OG a little later on in your studies. In addition, if you are planning to apply to EMBA Programs, then you might consider taking the Executive Assessment instead of the GMAT (assuming that the Programs that you plan to apply to will accept a Score from either Exam as part of the application process). If you'd like to discuss your options in more detail, then you can feel free to contact me directly at any time.

Before I can offer you any additional advice for your studies, it would help if you could provide a bit more information on how you've been studying and your goals:

1) How long have you studied? How many hours do you typically study each week?
2) Have you used any other study materials besides the course that you mentioned? What “brands” of CATs/mocks have you used?
3) On what dates (or approximate dates) did you take EACH of your CATs/mocks and how did you score on EACH (including the Quant and Verbal Scaled Scores for EACH)?
4) What is your overall goal score?
5) What Schools are you planning to apply to?

GMAT assassins aren't born, they're made,
Rich

Contact Rich at: Rich.C@empowergmat.com

Scott,

I am currently going through TTP and I am agreeing with your response. However, I would like to know how close the TTP questions are to the GMAT questions. I feel like the TTP questions are harder. I also feel like that the tests are built to help understand concepts and therefore I am wondering if they are close to the GMAT questions or not. I hope you get what I am trying to say, sorry if I confuse you.,,

Thanks!

Our questions match up with the difficulty and feel of the real GMAT questions very well. In other words they are close to actual GMAT questions.

Hi aosho103,

I’m glad to hear that you are enjoying the course. I’m sharing a few pointers that can help you understand how to best use OG. Here is an image explaining the 3 stages of prep and when we can or should not use the OGs, followed by a detailed discussion on your very interesting question.


Avoid solving OG Questions during Stage 1 (Learning) of your prep

During Stage 1, we focus on learning concepts one at a time. So, logically, we need practice questions that test each concept individually. We need such granular testing and practice to ensure that we understand concepts perfectly. OG questions generally are a mixed bag of 3 to 4 concepts per question. So, without having learnt all concepts fully, jumping into OG questions is not only a bad idea but also a waste of the official question.
In stage 1, you must stick to your e-GMAT concept quizzes, application quizzes, and practice quizzes.

Pass Stage 2 (Cementing) before jumping into OG Questions

Once you are done with Stage 1 for a particular sub-section, say SC (i.e., you’re done with learning the concepts and the meaning-based approach and have passed all the post-assessment & practice quizzes), you must focus on doing the Cementing Quizzes in Scholaranium (stage 2).

Cementing is all about applying the concepts and methodologies you learned during Stage 1 to GMAT-like questions, in a timed environment. Do not jump into OG without passing the thresholds of medium and hard Cementing quizzes in Scholaranium. Make sure you perform a Strategic Review of your Error Log to weed out all the inadequacies in your process of solving questions.

Once this is successfully done, you can test yourself on OG questions. The questions from OG are of excellent quality, no doubt. You can certainly assess yourself using these questions. But, the questions in our Cementing quizzes (Scholaranium) are of very high quality too. You can rest assured for the simple reason that ~60% of 700+ scores reported in the GMAT Club’s review section since 2021 are by e-GMATers. Without having high quality GMAT-like questions, we’d never have achieved such success.

How do you know that you are done with Cementing?

When you attempt the cementing quizzes, you will be given specific targets in accuracy and timing for different difficulty levels. You must cross these thresholds. For example, here is a graph showing the performance of a student in medium difficulty questions.


If your performance is consistently above the threshold (as shown in the image) in both Medium and Hard Cementing, then you are done with the Cementing Stage.

Now, you can use OG questions to do Cementing as well. You can create OG quizzes as follows -


Checking your Test Readiness (Stage 3) with OG questions

Once you pass the Cementing stage in all the sub-sections, you can use OG questions to check your Test Readiness. You can create quizzes as shown below. This will ensure that you can solve questions from all the sub-sections and will also increase your testing stamina.


Dedicated OG Quizzing Platform in your Course Dashboard

Your e-GMAT student platform contains a dedicated OG quizzing platform that can help you create quizzes such as the above. And it also gives you detailed analytics on your timing and accuracy across topics and difficulty levels. Using this data, you can identify your weaknesses and fix them.

Article explaining the entire process

We recently published an article explaining the entire process. This article covers when to do cementing quizzes, how to best use OG, what metrics to hit to ensure test readiness, and a lot more in excruciating detail. Here is the link to the article.

How to make the most out of OG for GMAT Prep?

I would also recommend that you reach out to your dedicated mentor (write to us at support@e-gmat.com) so that we can analyze your course attempt data, figure out your current prep level, and share our recommendation on OG practice.

Hope this helps!
-Sundeep