How is Wiley as a practice for quant questions?

Question

I've been using GMATClub's and Veritas Prep's Quant question bank to practice for the past 1.5 months. I've basically brushed up all the concepts in Quant and now have moved over to Verbal. On the Veritas question bank + Gmat club problems that i solve my average stands at 70% for medium and hard problems. I moved onto verbal and finally decided to use the Wiley question bank to keep my Quant practice going on as I concentrate on verbal.

My issue is that the questions that are even marked Hard on Wiley are not at all challenging. They are almost as easy as the 600-700 questions or sometimes sub 600 questions on Gmatclub. Is Wiley a good source for Quant practice? I take a 15 question practice every night after my verbal prep and I get almost 15/15 or 14/15 right. I don't want to waste time on something that won't sharpen my Quant skills.

Is Magoosh a good resource for quaunt? I don't really need the videos, just the question bank - I am generally good at self-study and have been using MGMAT.

mikemcgarry · Answer

Dear praneet87 , I see that no one has responded, so I will respond. This is Mike McGarry from Magoosh. I'm happy to give my two cents. :-)

I would say that Veritas has very good material, as does MGMAT. When you say "Wiley," do you mean the official practice that is a companion site to the GMAT OG? Those are official questions! Those are absolutely the best questions available, and the most GMAT like. Nobody knows what you mean if you call them "Wiley"--those are the OG questions, in fact, the exact same Quant questions that are in the OG, just on the computer. Here's the thing: for anyone really good at math, GMAT Quant really isn't that challenging. Everyone once in a while, they will throw you a question that's confusing because it's so out-of-the-box, but for the most part, if you are acing math on the official site, I don't know that you need to sharpen your math skills much more. I would recommend Magoosh if you needed more math practice, but it's not clear to me that you do. If you feel that you need another 500 questions, some extremely challenging, then certainly Magoosh would provide more practice. Here's a lesson, the depth of which may intrigue you: Multiples Here are a few reasonably challenging Magoosh Quant question: Proportion with radicals Fraction with factorials Fraction with variables My big question for you is: how is your verbal? Yes, dabble in math to stay sharp, but you don't have a lot to improve there. You can afford to dig in on Verbal. Does all this make sense? Mike :-)

praneet87 · Answer

Thank you so much for the response Mike. Yes I meant the online OG questions that you get with the OG Book. The last Veritas Prep CAT I took I got a 34 on Verbal and a 46 on Quant. I am still working on CR and then will move onto RC and then SC. Meanwhile I am working keeping my quant skills sharp by solving questions I am weak at. I will surely look into getting Magoosh to access the question bank. Thanks for the response. I probably get why I didn't get a response since I called them Wiley

. I was just confused because even the questions marked "Hard" were fairly very simple. On the contrary while using Veritas if I am presented with a 700+ question I find it challenging but OG ones don't seem so hard. Just wanted to know if I am wasting time working on those or not. Thanks Praneet

mikemcgarry · Answer

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 :-)

Mo2men · Answer

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

ENEM · Answer

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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How is Wiley as a practice for quant questions?

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