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Official vs. Unofficial Practice Tests Updated on: 31 Oct 2025, 17:47
Originally posted by bb on 29 Oct 2025, 21:39.
Last edited by bb on 31 Oct 2025, 17:47, edited 5 times in total.
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When to use Official mba.com Tests (GMAT Prep) vs. Unofficial Practice Tests

This has come up quite a bit in the forums and chats and I wanted to put together a comprehensive analysis now that we have an established ecosystem of practice tests for the Focus Edition, this topic will have a bit more detail. This topic was developed in parallel with hr1212 one: what to do when you run out of official tests but hopefully this topic will help you NOT to run out. Here is what I propose for Official vs. Unofficial tests:

Practice Test Use Cases:

Official Tests
(10-12)
Unofficial Tests
(12+)
First Diagnostic: ✅ ❌
Sectional Tests: ❌ ✅
Tracking Progress: ❌ ✅
Timing Practice: ❌ ✅
Score Estimate: ✅ ❌
Final Stretch: ✅ ❌


Official Exams (some Background):


  1. There are only 10-12 Official Tests.
    If we had enough official practice tests, we would not need unofficial tests, but unfortunately there are only about 10-12 official tests (there are 2 free tests that can be taken 2-3 times each without a repetition and then each of the paid tests can be taken twice (one attempt + reset). This is where the 10-12 test figure comes from.

  2. What makes official tests valuable:

    1. Questions are from real tests and are well-tested GMAT questions that generally are free from issues.
    2. Algorithm. GMAT Prep is said to follow the official IRT testing algorithm (sans experimental questions) which theoretically makes it even more accurate than the test
  3. Challenges with Official Tests:

    1. No explanations, the most obvious but you can google them usually.
    2. You cannot take tests in sections (e.g. can't take Quant only or DI by itself)
    3. No analytics or question types (you can look up our classification but you have to look up each question)
    4. Some of the Questions have been Exposed. The questions in the official tests are actually from many other sources and have mostly been previously published, even as early as OG 10 back in 2003 so you may run into them if you have been practicing extensively. These are not fresh questions (except some of the DI questions). The GMAT Focus format does not use brand new questions that were written or rewritten specifically for this test. A very small portion of new questions was added (Non-math related DS) but the others are from older tests.
      -
  4. Best Uses for Official Tests:

    1. First diagnostic - this has been debated for at least 20 years, and I have changed my mind. I feel it is a good idea to take your first diagnostic as the official exam. You are going to hit mostly easier questions and thus the value of "wasting" questions vs. receiving a reliable score that you won't question later is not much of a concern. Your later tests will involve harder questions as you would have improved.
    2. Check points - most people end up using unofficial tests to do sectional mocks (something official tests cannot do) and when they get a nice score bump, they usually want to double-check it, so it is a good idea to ensure that you don't celebrate too early as you will notice even from the official tests, scores fluctuate and jump around, so having a secondary tool is very helpful to make sure you are on track.

    3. Final Score check before you schedule the exam. Most valuable role the official tests play is to help you gauge your score using official questions and official algorithm. Even if you have a great closely correlated unofficial test score, many test-takers still feel most comfortable with the official tests (note that even official tests can have variations - more on that below and why). Very important: If you are going to gamble with your score, and decide to take the test even though you are not close to your target, make sure to save 3-4 official tests for a retake. In general, a good idea to save one for a retake so plan that way!

    4. Total Number of Official Tests Needed: you could get away with just 4-6 free tests that are taken over and over again. Definitely possible and many of us back in the day have been able to make it with only 4 official tests. But it is easy to buy additional 2-4 tests as you need them. Remember that each paid official test can be reset, so if you buy exams 3&4, you are really buying 4 practice tests. (note that your second retake of the same test will be less accurate).

-

Unofficial Tests:

  1. Current options of Practice Tests:

    1. GMAT Club Tests - 12 Full and 40 Sectional Tests (all of these are adaptive) in Pro and Elite Packages (no overlap between these test groups). We have offered practice tests for 15 years now with questions written by our own experts and moderators. There is a free test you can try.
    2. e-GMAT Mocks - they offer 5 Tests and you can actually get them free as a part of the GMAT Club Member Benefits (did you forget to claim them during registration? You can still do it. If you don't get an email within 1 minute; that means your account is already registered with, so you will need to change your GMAT Club email and try again).
    3. 15 Experts Global Tests - many seem to like these; good practice volume of 15 tests for $50 though they are not adaptive. These are also automatically bundled with GMAT Club Pro and Elite packages. You get 1 test free.
    4. Princeton Review - a number of their questions and scores tend to be off. You get 1 test free.
    5. Have you used others? Mention them - I would love to evaluate them.

      -
  2. What makes unofficial tests valuable:

    1. Sectional Tests - great way to check your progress within a section and also polish your performance under pressure as well as practice timing techniques. (see more below).
    2. Practice timing & Build Stamina (both sectional and full tests are perfect to rehearse your timing strategies and fine-tune your approach. GMAT Club tests even have an option for study mode when you can take untimed tests if needed or you can challenge yourself with a 10% time deficit)
    3. Explanations and Learning (e.g. we have some questions that are designed to teach you and you can gain a lot from the explanations, esp in the quant questions that will help you solve them faster and better)

      -
  3. Challenges with Unofficial Tests:

    1. Question quality - some unofficial tests feel too unofficial to say the least. You need to be able to judge if the questions you are seeing are close to what GMAT tests or they are not worth the time. On the back side of it, it takes a lot of effort to craft good quality GMAT questions so this is a very hard part for many test providers as it is resource-intensive process. This is not a leave it and forget it product - it takes time to address questions, review concerns, and from time to time touch up questions to improve the quality.
    2. Score certainty - no matter how well-tested algorithm is, people always feel more comfortable with the official score check (which is what I recommend as well)

      -
  4. Best Use Cases for Unofficial Tests

    1. Sectional Mocks - start taking sectional tests as soon as you are ready with one of the sections.

      1. Sectional tests allow you to start applying your test-taking strategies as well as start getting a handle on the timing so you start learning some of the painful lessons all of us have to learn with the GMAT.
      2. Taking just a section is much more approachable and a sectional test is 45 minutes vs. 2.5 hours for the full test. If you have not covered Q or DI, there is no point to waste that test/questions.
      3. Note that if you have finished a certain section, it does not make much sense (usually) to start taking sectional mocks. Taking practice quizzes for targeted practice is much more productive. E.g. You finish Assumptions or Mixture problems, good idea to practice these questions but no reason to go into RC or Probability if you have not covered those topics.

        -
    2. Identify Your Weaknesses and Trends

      1. Use the analytics/review to get a handle on where you need to improve and where your score improvement can come from.
      2. If you like the official score report, GMAT Club Tests also offer the same format for you to be able to consistently analyze your test performance.

        -
    3. Practice Timing - timing is what sinks scores the most so the more you can be prepared to face one those hard and unsolvable questions, the better you will be. Getting the experience of getting stuck and being stumped is a great way to prepare for it. GMAT Club's tests have a large number of question types and variations that you would have never seen before and will get stumped. Here is one such question.
    4. Build Stamina and Experiment - Sometimes you need to take tests to just slug through it. It would be a waste to use an official test if all you want to do is test your sectional sequence for example or to make sure you can stay focused for an extend period of time.



Common Questions:


Q. How many tests should you take?
A: Ideally, as few as possible - only as many as you need. Tests take considerable time to take and review (4-5 hours easily) and that's the time you are not studying. This is a required step but the fewer tests you can get away with, the faster you can be done with the GMAT.


Q: Why do official test scores fluctuate?
A: Mostly it is chance and you. Besides the obvious potential issues which we will exclude here (e.g. you saw some of the questions before), the main reason is YOU. The test measures your ability the best way it can and sometimes you get questions for certain topics that you know and other times topics you don't. You may also feel in the zone at one time and completely flustered and not performing another time. Poor time management is often goes hand in hand with being flustered and is the biggest score impactor. Note that the official test has a margin of error of about 30-40 points but even though the questions are official and the algorithm is the same on Official GMAT Prep mock tests, your difference between Real Test and Practice Tests will be greater due to stress and randomness, with some reporting as much as a 100 point fluctuation (all again due to personal issues with stress, timing, and mental state - it is not that tests are bad, just that we are not consistent as test-takers)

Q: How close are eGMAT, Experts-Global, GMAT Club, etc Tests to the real tests?
A: The answer will be elusive most of the time. Even GMAT Prep, which is supposed to be the closest sees quite a bit of variance. Official test has 30-40 points of standard error. Many of these tests are very close for some test-takers and distant for others but they tend to be consistent from test to test, so as long as you have some GMAT Prep tests to establish the correlation, you will be able to answer this question for yourself.
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