matt966 wrote:
Hi guys, I'm practicing with verbal section. Especially in these last days I'm facing some critical reasoning questions, as with sentence correction I'm almost done and I dont see any drastic improvement. I wanted to ask one thing. I've noticed that in the set 700-level critical-reasoning questions (here on gmat club available questions) i costantly get a 50% hit rate, is it a positive thing for someone that is aiming at about 680+? For example today i did 34 critical reasoning questions, and 17 were right and the other 17 were wrong. This is because i personally find really hard some questions that appear, for example those in which 70% of people that practice here like me get wrong, but there are also some questions in which 80-85% of people fail. Are these last questions i mentioned upper the 700 level? For example like 750 or even more? So, do you think that a hit rate of 50% in these set of questions is enough? If i try those in the 600-level set my hit rate is like 85% or more. I dont know exactly, but it is of course higher. My aim is to reach at least 680, but if i get a 700 is better. I ask this even because i notice that some people that reached the 700+ sometimes fail the 700 questions as well.
thanks if you will help me
Getting 50% of questions correct at a 700+ difficulty level is totally reasonable. Assuming that you take the test 'correctly' (finish both sections within the time limit, don't spend too much time on any particular type of question, avoid careless mistakes), you'll probably get 50-70% of the questions at 'your level' correct. Generally, if a student tells me that they're getting half to 2/3 of the questions right at a certain level, I see that as a reasonable difficulty level for them to study at. (If you're getting
no questions right, you're doing problems that are much too hard!)
That said, your question about high vs low 700 level questions can't really be answered. Describing a question as "700 level" or "750 level" makes it easier to talk about certain ideas. However, that's not really how questions are evaluated on the actual test. A question doesn't have an exact difficulty level; instead, it has a curve. The curve tells the algorithm how many people get that question right, and what those people end up scoring on the entire test. (For instance, it's possible that 45% of 46Q students get a certain question right, and 80% of 48Q students get the same question right.) That makes it difficult to pin down a question to a very specific difficulty level.
That's doubly true because your own strengths and weaknesses won't line up perfectly with what the GMAT thinks is hard and easy, and your test strategy should be based mostly on what's hard or easy for
you.
In short, don't worry too much about very fine distinctions in difficulty level! It sounds like you're studying the right material (although you should probably do some easier problems as well).
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