Interesting article for gmat preparers.

Question

Wanted to share this interesting article from magoosh with gmat preparers. I found it useful. Hope you will find it useful too. The good news is it endorses Gmac's claims that it does not test idioms anymore. :-D

my-experience-taking-investigating-gmat-by-magoosh-tutor-195512.html

It would be good to know the author of the article.

my-experience-taking-investigating-gmat-by-magoosh-tutor-195512.html It would be good to know the author of the article.

alexau · Answer

Thanks for posting the link!

Thought it was a really interesting article to read. Would love to know from GMAC themselves how much they changed the SC in that regard. I always felt that some of the answer explanations (whether from GMAC or here on GMAT Club) put too much emphasis on idioms when there were usually other fatal flaws in the SC answers.

Should be interesting to see in the next OG how much they discuss idioms. My guess would be that they will still appear on the exam, but the other errors will be more prominent and idioms may be a false decision point in SC.

Ergenekon · Answer

Agree with you. However, we should remember that we don't have any proof that gmac organises Official Guides based on real exam questions. It can be that they just choose their best retired questions. Their resources are not limitless. Sometimes when I read what type of questions applicants ask experts (every tidbit), I decide that testing idioms was an advantage for exam takers who are eager to memorize things. Guys who have analytical mindset are not inclined towards such behaviour.

alexau · Answer

Thats's definitely a great point. We will never know what questions they are giving us. I would hope that GMAC will make the official guide and GMATPrep relatively close to what we can expect on the actual day (and up until this point I think they have succeeded) and I would hope that they would update both sources with new questions that better reflect the reality of the test.

Couldn't agree more on the idioms and memorizing. As a reasoning exam, I felt that there wasn't much room to reason through an idiom. While very important in the English language, to me it just never seemed to fit properly in the exam.

Ergenekon · Answer

Alexau, you seem to score great. What was your experience with the real exam?

alexau · Answer

Feel free to check out my debrief here: 1-month-retake-debrief-710-q49-v38-to-760-q48-v47-194858.html#p1503598 The most important thing for me was boosting my verbal. I felt pretty good about quant (was scoring Q50 consistently in practice exams) so I knew that I needed to boost verbal to get my overall score up. Ultimately, SC was the biggest problem for me. But it really came down to making SC second nature as quant already was. As a native speaker, RC was pretty straightforward for me and CR wasn't terrible. I think the biggest thing for SC is to identify the decision points immediately after reading the sentence. The decision points should tell you immediately what is being tested in the question. Reading the first few and last few words are great places to start looking for decision points. Usually you will be able to get some sort of 3/2 split, thus eliminating a few potential choices immediately. From here its important to find alternative decision points and then repeat the elimination process. For verbal it is essential to find 4 fatally flawed answers, rather than finding the 1 correct answer. For CR you need to predict the answer, and for RC you need to find the supporting sentence(s). Verbal can be much more "formulaic" than some people think as each question is going to have 4 answers that are clearly incorrect. For quant, its much harder to say the same. There is always one right answer and 4 incorrect answers, but its more about the method and application. I took the Veritas Prep Live Online course with Ravi Sreerama (awesome guy, PM me for more info on him specifically), Magoosh Premium (after first exam, wanted score improvement guarantee), MGMAT SC book, PowerScore CR Bible, and all of the GMAC official resources (GMATPrep basic, question pack and exam pack 1, Verbal review, Quant review, and OG). Definitely make sure to use the GMAC stuff. I had access to the GMAT Club tests but personally didn't like them. They were way too difficult and only hurt my confidence.

Ergenekon · Answer

Alexau, sorry for replying late. I kept your debrief on my browser and tried to read slowly. I can definitely say it is one of the best debriefs I have read so far. Very realistic and cut of the any redundant information. Thanks for this:). I would like to ask you about your experience with Veritas Cats. In addition, I understand why you did not like the gmatclub tests. However, they are very good for stamina. After doing them, quant section of the real gmat seemed very easy.

alexau · Answer

Thanks for the kind words!

I definitely agree with you that after doing some of the GMAT Club tests, the actual GMAT seemed easier. I just didn't feel like they were as adaptive as some of the test prep companies' exams and personally they just made me feel bad about myself because I would score so low.

I liked the Veritas CATs. I used their live online course so I had all 7 and didn't have any issues with them. I think the verbal is a bit harder than what you will see on the actual exam but that is a consistent trend among all prep companies. It is so hard to truly replicate GMAT questions and I think a lot of the test prep companies would rather give their customers something a little bit harder than what you will actually see. That being said, this is why I am a huge proponent of the official materials. Apparently the OG 2015 didn't have any new material but the OG 2016 should have some new questions. I would also pick up the Verbal and Quant review books. Definitely use all of the GMATPrep resources and do those questions a few times.

Feel free to reach out with any more questions. Always happy to help!

Ergenekon · Answer

Thanks Alexau. I have used all official materials already. I happy to hear your review of Veritas Cats, because I plan to use them. I think OG 16 won't be available till I take the exam. You improved your verbal from V38 to V47. It is amazing. However I see that your quant scored dropped. What was the reason? In addition, I want to ask you about probability and permutation problems. They are my weak areas. How many questions approx. you encountered from these topics? And what was the level of difficulty?

alexau · Answer

I think I ended up just going too fast on Quant and making a few silly mistakes. I had been scoring Q50 consistently on GMATPrep and Veritas CATs even before my first exam and had not scored below Q49 since my initial diagnostic, so I was pretty surprised with my Q48. With that said, its hard to truly complain since my Verbal was usually around V44.

I think the most important thing on Quant is just to take a little bit more time on each question and make sure you get it right. I know on one DS problem (which was my strength), I submitted the answer and then immediately knew it was incorrect because another scenario popped into my head. It's those types of silly mistakes that you nee to eliminate. Had I taken a few seconds longer I would have gotten the question correct (and it probably would have had an impact further on in the Quant section).

For combinatorics and probability, don't expect a ton. I would say 4 questions MAX. Note that this is regardless of how you are doing. If you do well, you will see a few of them, if you are doing poorly, you will still see a few of them. Difficulty, as always, will depend on how you perform for the rest of your exam. They will definitely test it to a certain extent so you should know the stuff if you are looking for a top score.

Ergenekon · Answer

Thanks Alexau. Looking forward to discussing more things with you.

Ergenekon · Answer

ALexau, what do you think about the post of this another user:
 I sat the exam today, and the SC was nothing like OG. It was kind of similar to GMATPrep, but even more difficult than that. I say that because a vast majority of the questions I received had more emphasis on tone/clarity, as opposed to the "technical" issues like parallelism/modifiers/etc. I'd say it is a bit skewed in favor of native speakers at the moment

alexau · Answer

Everyone will have their own opinion on questions and difficulty. The only thing I can really say here is that there may be a reason that the questions were not similar. If the person taking the exam was performing well above or below their practice exam level, they are likely to see different questions. Additionally, if the person taking the exam has one particular weakness (e.g. modifiers), and gets two of these questions in a row, they may mentally think the exam is much harder than it actually is.

The entire GMAT is all based on statistics and psychometrics. Every question is assigned a percentile difficulty level based on thousands of prior results. While the exam may have changed over the years (and thus some of the OG and GMATPrep questions out there are not as relevant), they are still the "most accurate" study materials.

While the above quote may have some validity, it's hard to truly say how different the questions were. Maybe the person only did the easy OG questions and then stopped, or maybe the person hit a few extra CR and RC which made SC even harder. There are too many different things at play to say definitively what happened.

Ergenekon · Answer

Thanks Alexau. However, the interesting thing is his notes are comparable to what others have noted.

alexau · Answer

The main problem I have with his quote is that there are so many other factors which could make the SC more difficult. Maybe he was behind on time, maybe he realized he made some silly mistakes, etc...

Those factors absolutely would impact someone on test day, and would make the exam appear much harder than it actually is. I wouldn't worry too much about what a few people say. Some will say it was easier, some will say its harder. If anything, you want it to be harder, because that means you are doing well and are being challenged.

At the end of the day, if you can get the hard verbal questions in GMATPrep correct, you will probably be good for 700 level verbal score. All it comes down to then is your quant score and how you perform under pressure.

Ergenekon · Answer

It wasn't the notion whether it is hard or easy that I noticed. The main takeaway here is that real gmat questions are much more than what we find in official materials. If in official materials we could eliminate some choices by grammar issues, it seems it will be much more difficult to do so in real gmat. What was your experience? Were you able to eliminate many answers on grammatical issues?

alexau · Answer

Understood. Personally, I disagree with the quote. I think that there truly are 4 fatally flawed answers for each verbal question. Now, whether we find all of the decision points for each SC question and eliminate them based on strict rules or just by a hunch is a totally different story. But I found that for every SC question there is a reason that 4 of the answers are incorrect.

I do think that clarity / illogical meaning is an important thing to check for on each SC question, but I think there are going to be parallelism / modifier / agreement / tense issues on most questions. I rarely found that a question was solely based on clarity or tone (idk what "tone" even means for SC, maybe tense? or timeline?) in both my studies and on the actual exam. While lesser known or more subtle topics will appear on the exam, I almost never found that a question centered on something like an idiom or meaning. I used those as decision points, but often found another decision point to further narrow down the choices.

Depending on the length of the underlined portion, you could have 1-4 decision points to choose from. Even on one word underlines, you can find decision points by using the entire sentence to your advantage.

Maybe we agree to disagree, but I found that each question was pretty clear, even when I got it incorrect and reviewed it later on. Every topic will be tested throughout the exam, some more than others, but rarely does a SC question focus on using only one tool (no different than quant), which is the beauty of the GMAT.

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Interesting article for gmat preparers.

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