What is a 700+ level question?by Mike McGarry at MagooshUnderstandably, ambitious GMAT students want to challenge themselves. That’s great. GMAT students want to gauge their relative ease or difficulty in solving a question with what might be called the “objective difficulty” of a question: in other words, if I can solve this problem easily, approximately where does this put me in terms of my GMAT preparation? Toward this end, a student will often ask of relatively difficult question: is this a 700+ level question?
While students’ ambitions are commendable, and while curiosity about this point is eminently understandable, there is something inherently flawed in the logic of that question. This requires a slightly deeper examination.
700+ LevelWhat does “700+ level” mean on the GMAT? Well, if we look at GMAT Percentiles, the percentile for 700 is 89%, which roughly means that 10-11% of the population scores at that level or above, and 89% of the population scores below that level. If we were to sample a large number of GMAT test takers, ask them all a particular question, and fewer than 10% could get the question correct, then with some justification some might refer to this as a 700+ level question. Notice that a very large process of data collection would be needed to verify that any question is of this sort.
Even if we were to gather all that data, the notion is still suspect. Suppose we were to gather a large batch of questions that 90% of the test-taking population regularly get wrong. The fact that one can get a single question of this sort correct doesn’t mean bupkis. If you can get these very difficult questions correct 30-50% of the time, that’s not necessarily telling. If you can simply nail them almost every single time, that’s impressive, and certainly would be more indicative of an elite level of performance.
Even then, it’s a mistake to think of the test too reductionistically, as if mastery of each individual possible question necessarily leads to mastery of the test. . . .
See more at:
https://magoosh.com/gmat/2014/is-this-a- ... -question/