How is Wiley as a practice for quant questions?

Dear Praneet,

I'm happy to respond. There's a funny thing to understand about test prep companies, such as Veritas and Magoosh. We don't write the real test. We are left in a position of guessing exactly how hard the GMAT would make their questions: of course, we have studied the test carefully for years, but we still don't know exactly what the GMAT would or would not ask on certain high-end challenge questions. As a general rule, test prep companies strive to make their questions a notch or two harder than they might have to be. You see, if our students master our hard questions, and then go to the real GMAT and say, "Wait, that was easy," then that's exactly the result we really want. By contrast, if our questions aren't hard enough, customers will master our questions, then go the GMAT and say, "Wait, this is much harder than I expected!" That result would make the test prep company look bad. For us, it's a big win if our questions overestimate the difficulty of the test and a big loss if we underestimate the difficulty, so there's a strong motivation to make the questions more on the hard side. We're doing this because we are in the position of preparing student for a test we don't write. The GMAT OG is different: they don't have to guess what will be on the GMAT. They know. They are simply sharing released old questions, trying to be representative without really worrying at all if anything is too easy or too hard. Their questions represent most of the middle of the Bell Curve of scores, out to the arms, but not necessarily everything at the very top. They don't have to worry about that. If someone bombs the GMAT and then comes back to Veritas or Magoosh and says, "your material didn't prepare me well: it wasn't hard enough," then that's a big indictment of what we do--we didn't do our job right! But if someone bombs the GMAT and then comes back and says, "the OG didn't prepare me well: it wasn't hard enough," then GMAC is simply going to say, "Well, that's not our problem. The OG is representative of all students. If you needed more prep on the hard questions, you should have used a test prep company." GMAC occupies a very different market space than do the test prep companies: the test prep companies cooperate with GMAC--the folks at GMAC are fabulous!--but we make our money in very different ways.

It's always important to think about the economics of all the players. OG questions and question from Magoosh or Veritas or any other company have very different economic histories and very different economic motivations. All this affects student experience.

One more recommendation I'll make:
Nova’s GMAT Math Prep Course Book Review
This is a huge source of practice questions, many much harder than the GMAT. The explanations are not very good, so it's not a good book for someone who has a lot of math to learn, but for someone who is already performing at a very high level, such as you, it's an excellent source of practice.

Let me know if you have any further questions.
Mike

I can provide my insights. Magoosh has great question bank (Q 648 & V 558) with high quality. Each question's answer comes with its video and text. If you have doubt, you can email for support. The most issue I insist on is the 'reflection process', ESPECIALLY in Verbal. You answer 15 question every night. But do you analyze the wrong answers. Why do they wrong? You will get maximum benefit of this process in verbal.

I do not know if you have the Verbal reviews edition for Quant and verbal. Both are great companion to the Official Guide.

Good luck in your journey

Hi,

Wiley basically offers OG question bank, if that's what you're talking about. While it is convenient at best, it also wastes time and offers you questions that are a mixed bag of easy/medium and hard. My only problem with Wiley is that it repeats questions that you may have already solved and doesn't give option of solving questions of your preferred topic. Offlate you can't even select difficulty level.

Magoosh's questions are great from a training perspective but not advisable to solve those from exam perspective. Their score predictor inflates scores...so not reliable from exam perspective, but it's a great training ground.

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