General GMAT Chat

How is Princeton review mock tests? I recently took it, found quant easy but verbal seemed very tough to me.

Ultimately, you may want to test your performance on the Official Mocks provided by GMAC itself. Fair to say they are the best mocks out there in representing what you'll see on an actual exam.

Hi
Can anyone suggest me which course should I take. I am just starting the Gmat prep and mostly targeting for ISB and IIMs.

Oh look five and then 20 messages above. Same recommendation 😎

Same question in discussion yesterday 😇👍
Welcome to GMAT Club.

Hello, dear collegues!
I’m Eva, has 2 mounth that I descovered that I will have to do the GMAT and with this information I started my preparation to do this exmam. But, I’m totally terrible in maths, while this 2 months praperin I didn’t see any improment, what make me realize that I need someone to hold my hand and teach me math to do the GMAT.
Someone to help me?

EvaBrito, Hi Eva, send me direct please I will try to help you

Does anyone know how many 700 level questions does someone scoring a 99 percentile get?

EvaBrito, please share with me as well, i need them terribly 🥹

What you get 🥹🥹

Whatever*

On what? Verbal, quant, anything? 😂

It’s a bit of a misconception or rather I should say it’s a huge misconception. Even though GMAT is an adaptive test, it doesn’t mean you get to worlds hardest questions every single question. GMAC has to change the question bank every two weeks. Hard questions are extremely challenging to create so instead of hard questions, you get average questions or questions to just take a long time to solve. Long passages, long sentences, or just simply average difficulty…

Another point of confusion is that you don’t need to score 99th percentile in Quant or Verbal to get 99th percentile on the GMAT. Getting low 90s on quant and verbal is sufficient to get 750 or 760… the keys to be balanced and do a good job in Quant and verbal… and also balanced in timing. Chasing every single question will not end well. You don’t have to win every battle to win the war… you may lose the war by trying to win a battle.

Two people who get 760 (99 percentile) scores may not necessarily have the same correct vs. incorrect question ratios.

Because you can take the gmat every 2 weeks…. And the question bank has to be refreshed.

I don’t understand. Are you trying to say that the gmac creates around 100-200 brand new questions every two weeks? Or are you trying to say that they have a couple of different question banks and they shuffle them around every two weeks?

For your purposes as a test taker, it doesn’t really matter what they do…. But from the point of test security, if they had used the same question banks over and over, it would be pretty easy to cheat on the test. For obvious reasons, GMAT does not share their approach to question Security but the general belief is that they have to regularly write new questions. I don’t know if they write 100 or if they write five every week. However, they do have to write them and there have been issues with procuring new questions based on some test experience experiences…. But as you can see from GMAT prep tests three, four, five, six. This question banks only have the exact number of questions that you get served. 31 for quant and that’s it for example… and they don’t need 31 hard questions and 31 medium questions and 31 easy. 31 total is given to everyone …

actually, a brand new question bank must have more than a thousand questions so I doubt that the gmac creates a thousand questions every two weeks. So the more likely scenario would be them shuffling question banks around.
their cost per question is $5000 and around 200k people take the test every year so their revenues are 250*200k = 50million from the test takers approx which is to be share equally between the gmac and the test centers so 25million revenues +revenues from book sales and other stuff. If you were to subtract their expenses out of this then I would assume they would have at max around 2-3 million to spend on question banks per year. so that translates to between 80 and 120 questions per year. So I doubt that gmac can afford to create a brand new question bank of a thousand questions every two weeks.

I don’t think a question bank needs to have 1000 questions as demonstrated by GMAT prep tests three, four five and six… we have also seen people making very few mistakes and getting penalized by the score. There’s more indicators the question bank lately has been on the smaller side. However, it’s only at conjecture and a guess. At least on my side.

aah. I see. makes sense. Well, it is worth taking those 3, 4, 5, 6 tests if they don’t have enough variable questions? I mean, if lets say someone gets the first medium Q correct then they have to throw them hard questions? How could they possibly manage all that using just 31 V and 36 Q questions? a fixed question bank must have equal proportions of easy/medium/hard questions? so about 10 hard questions per section?

*is it worth. I meant. typo

if you are right about the question bank and lets say that I take test number 3 which has 10 easy, 11 medium and 10 hard questions for the verbal section(I am assuming). Then that doesn’t match the difficulty level on ESR reports of the real tests? where a 730 scorer starts at medium and usually remains at medium-high level questions? Without the ESR report’s difficulty graph ever going to easy?

bbbb, aah, I see now. Maybe you are right about what you said.
You see, each dot on this graph represents the average difficulty of 9 questions for a total of 4 dots. so if the average difficulty of 9 questions starts at close to medium and then remains at medium-high, then it absolutely must have had some easy questions in there as well. So you are right. But I am still not able to understand how the gmat could give someone a 99 percentile by testing them on equal proportions on easy, medium and hard questions? The graph skews medium-high for on this so surely there has to be more difficult questions and less easy/medium questions? What are your thoughts?

bb, maybe that’s why the mocks are just a guideline and not a sure measure of someone’s ability? because you would surely get more difficult questions on the real test than the official gmat mock offers?
Would that be a safe judgement to make according to you?