SHIFT FROM IDIOMS TO MORE MEANING BASED QUESTIONS IN SC

Question

Hello Experts,
 GMATNinja   ChiranjeevSingh   MartyTargetTestPrep   KarishmaB   DmitryFarber   AjiteshArun  
 AnthonyRitz 
 avigutman

In most of the Medium/Hard questions of OLDER OGs  (OG 10, 11, 12)   , apart from the most tested topics  -Modifiers , SV , Verb Tense , Comparison ,and Parallelism- test of Idioms is also tagged along .

Say for Example in below OG10 question:-

This is a Verb-Tense question. Apart from Verb-Tense , usage of Idioms is also tested here.

Can I say that now these type of questions are less tested by GMAC ?
Is there shift from Idioms to Meaning based questions ?
Should I focus on solving questions of recent OGs ( Say 2019 2020 2021 2022 ) ?

Feedback Appreciated
Thanks.

LINK-  https://gmatclub.com/forum/in-reference-to-the-current-hostility-toward-smoking-smokers-frequent-79560.html

avigutman · Answer

The only people who know for sure are the test writers over at GMAC.
Anecdotally, it does seem that you are correct,  PriyamRathor , and that's the advice that I give my students.

MartyTargetTestPrep · Answer

There has been a shift, and this shift was formally acknowledged by GMAC in 2011.

There are two aspects to the shift.

One is that there is a greater emphasis on meaning and a reduced emphasis on idiomatic correctness.

The second is that, when issues in sentence versions do involve idiomatic structures, those structures will only be widely used ones, as opposed to less commonly used ones or ones that are regional. The purpose of this change is to ensure that SC questions are not biased against international test-takers who would be less likely to know less commonly used idiomatic structures.

Regarding which SC questions you should practice with, the more recent ones tend to be more like the ones you'll see on today's GMAT. At the same time, there is still much to be learned from the earlier questions. So, you can certainly improve your skills by using them.

At the same time, if you do use older questions, you're best off using some judgment regarding what to take from them since not only do they emphasize idiomatic structures more than today's GMAT questions but also their quality is lower in general. So, you may find yourself attempting to figure what's going on with questions that are in flawed.

Note that, the fact that the shift was acknowledged in 2011 doesn't mean that questions in the 2012 OG are-post shift questions. After all, the questions in the OG are retired questions from past tests. So, questions in an OG could have appeared on the GMAT several years before the publishing of the OG.

AnthonyRitz · Answer

Full agree with  MartyTargetTestPrep  and  avigutman .

GMAC changed vendors and shifted away from testing idioms. They've said so themselves.

As for what materials are good, I think OG 2016 and forward are pretty safe.

Finally, I do want to jump in and note that your question is a perfect example of why the "idiom" thing was  always  overblown. I don't care how it's tagged; it's not really testing idioms, since you can get to E by just leaning on construction (B, C, D) and verb tense (A).

egmat · Answer

Hey  PriyamRathor

Thank you for this interesting question. Sorry for the delay in response. We have some excellent responses to your query already, but I'd like to add the following:

Yes, it is true that there has been a clear shift in focus from “idiom” to “meaning-based” questions around 2010 onward. OG 10 was written by ETS in 2002/3. However, OG11 was written by the GMAC around 2010, when this shift was made amply clear.

That said,  is it wise to ignore idiomatic errors altogether?

No, not really.

With respect to the GMAT, the word “ Idiom ” has a broad meaning. In fact, to this day, the Official Guides have a section dedicated to explaining the “Idiomatic Errors” tested on the GMAT. These include:

a. Prepositions with abstract concepts (eg: in love, on guard, at work, etc.)

b. Correlatives (eg: more...than; as...as; neither...nor, etc.)  
 c. Verb phrases or phrasal verbs (eg: turned out, come up, come up with, etc.)

d. Pronouns with no reference (eg: Placeholder Pronoun ‘it’), and  
 e. Compound modifiers (eg: all in all, by and by, by and large, etc.)

What’s important to understand is that Idiom-related questions do not always involve identifying malformed idioms. Sometimes the crucial insight may involve determining which of multiple idiomatic meanings is intended, or whether a phrase should be treated as an idiom or not.

a. Similar phrases often have very different idiomatic uses and meanings; consider, for example, come through with, come down with, and come up with.

b. Some idiomatic preposition-plus-noun phrases have alternate forms. For example, it is correct to say either ‘with regard to’ or ‘in regard to’.

c. Many idiomatic phrases have multiple meanings, which are not always similar. For example, ‘come out with’ in some contexts means ‘express’ and in others means ‘publish’ or ‘begin marketing’.  
 d. For many idiomatic expressions, there are special exceptions to the standard forms. For example, phrases of the form ‘not only ... but’ are standardly completed with ‘also’, but there are special cases in which “also” is unnecessary or misleading.

Above all, GMAT Sentence Correction questions neither assess nor presuppose knowledge of obsolete forms of idiomatic expression, highly specialized technical jargon, distinctive dialect constructions, or slang idioms that have not become standard forms of expression.

Most of what I’ve mentioned above has been taken verbatim from the OG 2022  . So, to conclude, we need to understand what the GMAT means by “Idiomatic Errors”, and we need to continue to ensure our awareness of standard expressions in English. However, owing to the shift, the incorrect choices will most likely have other errors in them as well. So, in the event that you’re unable to identify the idiomatic error, you should, in all probability, have other lifelines at your disposal.

I hope this helps improve your understanding.

Happy Learning!

Abhishek

SHIFT FROM IDIOMS TO MORE MEANING BASED QUESTIONS IN SC

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