Is OG representative of the actual test or not?

Question

I've been reading here and there as I'm sure many other people here do, confessions of people who sat the exam and got 700+, who claim that they mainly went through the OG12 or OG13, and maybe one more set of coursebooks like MGMAT, and with 3 months study they succeeded.

Now, I've read both ends. From
"OG is mostly sufficient for the 650-700 level"

to

"OG's hard questions are the easiest ones in the actual test"

As we know gmatclub is miles ahead in difficulty from OG (even 600-700) and I'm sure other sources are too.

What gives?

bb · Answer

I have seen all of those comments and they are all right. It depends on the topic/person/etc and their personal strengths and impressions. Also keep in mind that some of the questions encountered on the test were probably experimental thus they may have seemed too hard but they were actually not real-representative questions of the experience.

Well.... OG is the source of the official questions which is especially important for Verbal. 
You have to split up OG into 2 categories: Verbal and Quant. It is the best source for verbal. Quant - it is on the easier side with only a handful truly hard questions. There are other sources such as MGMAT (though it relies on OG), Kaplan, and of course GMAT Club tests that already have that will give you plenty of quant practice.

Hope this clears it up.

Skag55 · Answer

Thanks for the reply bb, and for confirming that what I've been reading is not far from truth.
It's just weird, for quant for instance, judging from the content of gmatclub where the questions always manage to have a special "twist", how one manages to hit a 49+ out of 51.
Yes, he/she might "always have been good at math" but for example being in a managerial position for 5 years, managing a high score especially with the variety of quant topics and the time restriction, bu just following OG and MGMAT is one hell of an achievement (which makes me wonder

)

Carcass · Answer

I 'd like to express my simple opinion.

It is true that for the quant part of the exam OG is not representative of toughness of the same BUT in my opinion the general attitude towards the gmat by the test takers is wrong

What is important is just to pick the low medium and medium upper level RIGHT, and in this scenario the oG is more or less useful for this purpose. You will not see even a 700 level question if you do not do that. People are concerned, literally get out of their mouth rivers of saliva to solve mock tests or materials in the upper level zone, with the consequence to fail, because ?? simple enough: they do not know how to solve the questions below this range. Maybe a test taker will never see that zone.

To confirm this is the same nature of the exam: pick an easy medium level question hurts more than a difficult question.

Moreover, people are so worried to get right a 700 level question that lose focus on other important variables of the GMAT: the stress, a timed exam, tiredness, even a a misunderstood word and you pick wrong even the easiest question and so on and so forth.

Moral of the story: stay on the look out to think that a 700 level question is the most important thing of the whole story: it is NOT true. It is not the core or gist of the story.

It is not what you should look for during your preparation

regards

Skag55 · Answer

Carcass I'm totally with you on this. My aim (and I hope many other people's as well) is to knock down anything in between 600-700, no excuses. Personally I don't worry too much about getting 700+, it would be nice, however how many times have we heard that 680 can be of equal strength of a 750 when tutors turn around and say "hey, 680 is a great score". 680 or 690 doesn't mean "you suck", it means as you said that there were other factors involved like stress etc.
So to recap my question was, "if one can manage all the OG quant questions without too much struggle, perhaps say 95% success, is he ok to think that he's well around the 700 mark?"

Also one more thing, how does GMAC believe that one can achieve 700+ without providing him with material to grind his teeth on? Unless it's self-implied that if you want a 700+  you will  subscribe to a course,  you will  search the internet etc, which I'd find a little inefficient from the GMAC's side.

Carcass · Answer

Ok I made the thing simple enough trying to answer to your question.

On one hand, for quant side: a tough question is only a simple question wrapped in a more complicated way, formulated to intimidate you and to pick wrong. Nothing more than this. If your foundamentals are really strong you can get right the most difficult questions.

Look at this example:

It is a really tough question unless you have clear the concepts behind the same.

I'm not a professor, I'm only a diligent student: now the SD is how the elements in a set spread out the mean. If the range is 6 the difference between the first term and the last is always six, no matter what: 1 ---> 7 or 900 ---> 907 tha SD is always the same, so we know all of the distances withinn our set. So is sufficient. the second NO because the average doesn't help us enough.

As you can see if you have strong foundamentals, a difficult question is not a crazy puzzle. It is only like an onion, with different layers in which you have to go down to the core

On the other hand, for verbal part: you are ok because it reflects well the exam; if you are really strong on verbal, then you could achive a 700 score.

People have not a decent score because are obsessed by the quant part but for the GMAC a formula is less important than a truly understand of verbal: tense, logic reasoning and so on. We communicate via words not formulas. So the verba part is more important than quant. (and of course I'm not saying that quant part is NOT important)

In other words: a 45% percentile on verbal, and you pick right only the 60% quant questions right, then you can achive a 700 score (mine is just an example to show you what I'm saying)

Hope now is more clear to you.

Skag55 · Answer

Yup, thanks, it's clear. I agree that most people concentrate heavily on quant (maybe on my 2nd attempt I will concentrate more heavily on verbal!), but quant has got a bigger variety of topics whereas verbal "is spoken every day, it should be easier". At least that's my false thinking!

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Is OG representative of the actual test or not?

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