How many 700+ level questions can one expect?

Not as many as people tend to think. The crazy part is that the numbers can also vary from test to test depending on the question bank being used.

I would say on my test I saw only one 750 level question and perhaps a handful of hard questions in verbal. Obviously this also depends on your progression and if you make a mistake, as you know you get an easier question and if you get it right, you get a hard question so and so forth. I think if you’re shooting for a 730 or higher score, you will likely see fewer than 2 750+ questions, and fewer than 5 700-level questions. This is a totally made up number. You could go through one of your GMAT prep tests and map out the difficulty using the GMAT Club timer and see what that research shows you.

PS. We have seen several situations from the enhance score reports where people only made a couple mistakes and got pretty low scores for what you would think he would get. Analyzing their reports, it became clear that they never really got any hard questions and that was because the database did not have hard questions and because they made mistakes in a few medium difficulty questions, they got penalized quite a bit more. There was even a famous case when a person made zero mistakes in their verbal portion of the GMAT and they still did not get the top score. They had a peeled and it was manually adjusted but it underscores the point that the number of difficult questions you see is driven by the database and the reason you don’t see as many hard questions as everyone thinks, is that it’s very hard to write hard questions and it’s very very expensive. It is a lot cheaper and economical to provide medium and easy level questions and try to catch people that way and frankly, it’s sufficient as we can see.

PS. Bottom line is that you will have a lot better ROI focusing on medium level questions because you are guaranteed to see a lot more of those and in my experience especially in verbal, you have very different strategies for medium critical reasoning and hard critical reasoning questions. It’s good to know both but if you expect four out of five critical reasoning questions to be medium or easy, there’s no reason to start with the approach that you would use for a hard one. My 2 cents.

PPS. As a matter of fact, I know that a number of experts including GMAT Ninja do not agree with my critical reasoning approach. I like to answer critical reasoning questions ahead of time after reading the paragraph. I find it faster and more reliable. In their experience, tutoring students, they found that not to be the case for the majority so you have to figure out what works best for you. But the part I think they would agree with is that most questions you will encounter, will not be the hard questions.

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