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S2021S
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Toughest practice tests 10 Sep 2021, 07:13
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Very off-topic since this is a GMAT forum but I took the GRE the previous Wednesday (Sep 1st), 3.5 days after the GMAT. Was curious about the GRE and spent the day after the GMAT reading opinions about it - the consensus seemed to be that it was much easier than the GMAT, so I decided to book an exam for the earliest available slot. Didn't have the time to do any mock exams but, in hindsight, they were not required anyway.

The math sections must have been the easiest math I've done since I was ~11-12 years old (otoh, GMAT math is genuinely interesting and non-trivial) and had 12 to 16 minutes left on the clock on each of the three math sections (GRE gives the option to 'review' your answers in case you want to change any - I rechecked the answers a couple of times, then got bored and clicked on 'Next').

Didn't quite manage a perfect score on the Verbal (ran out of time on one of the two sections and had to blindly click on some answer choice for the last two questions - pretty sure these were the only two I got wrong in the whole exam; was going at the GMAT pace of ~ 1.75 minutes per question - GRE needs 1.5 min/Q on Verbal- and didn't realize that I was running out of time, else would have sped up on some of the earlier questions instead of checking twice or thrice that I've got the correct answer!), but felt it was slightly easier than or around the same level of toughness as the GMAT Verbal. GRE Verbal does require one to know fairly obscure words (I'm comfortable with these - I would back myself to know the meaning of >90-95% of the more complicated words from a standard dictionary - but even if a student isn't aware of these words from prior exposure, I guess he/she can, given sufficient preparation time, easily memorize these?) but is otherwise quite similar to GMAT Verbal.

Interestingly, they have two 30-minute essays on the GRE - one is very GMAT-like (where they ask you to find faults with the reasoning of someone, usually something like "company A is trying to increase its profits, the CEO has proposal X and it is based on Y") and the other one on a more general topic, one that involves expressing shades of political and/or philosophical opinion (I love these topics, because I have strong views on these, and because these topics allow one to draw on real-world examples). Got a 5.5, which is slightly better than my GMAT essay score - pretty sure this is down to the latter essay.
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Toughest practice tests 10 Sep 2021, 09:26
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S2021S
Very off-topic since this is a GMAT forum but I took the GRE the previous Wednesday (Sep 1st), 3.5 days after the GMAT. Was curious about the GRE and spent the day after the GMAT reading opinions about it - the consensus seemed to be that it was much easier than the GMAT, so I decided to book an exam for the earliest available slot. Didn't have the time to do any mock exams but, in hindsight, they were not required anyway.

The math sections must have been the easiest math I've done since I was ~11-12 years old (otoh, GMAT math is genuinely interesting and non-trivial) and had 12 to 16 minutes left on the clock on each of the three math sections (GRE gives the option to 'review' your answers in case you want to change any - I rechecked the answers a couple of times, then got bored and clicked on 'Next').

Didn't quite manage a perfect score on the Verbal (ran out of time on one of the two sections and had to blindly click on some answer choice for the last two questions - pretty sure these were the only two I got wrong in the whole exam; was going at the GMAT pace of ~ 1.75 minutes per question - GRE needs 1.5 min/Q on Verbal- and didn't realize that I was running out of time, else would have sped up on some of the earlier questions instead of checking twice or thrice that I've got the correct answer!), but felt it was slightly easier than or around the same level of toughness as the GMAT Verbal. GRE Verbal does require one to know fairly obscure words (I'm comfortable with these - I would back myself to know the meaning of >90-95% of the more complicated words from a standard dictionary - but even if a student isn't aware of these words from prior exposure, I guess he/she can, given sufficient preparation time, easily memorize these?) but is otherwise quite similar to GMAT Verbal.

Interestingly, they have two 30-minute essays on the GRE - one is very GMAT-like (where they ask you to find faults with the reasoning of someone, usually something like "company A is trying to increase its profits, the CEO has proposal X and it is based on Y") and the other one on a more general topic, one that involves expressing shades of political and/or philosophical opinion (I love these topics, because I have strong views on these, and because these topics allow one to draw on real-world examples). Got a 5.5, which is slightly better than my GMAT essay score - pretty sure this is down to the latter essay.
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Interesting experiment, S2021S. Since you encountered three Quant sections, you can be confident that one of them was entirely experimental—which one is your best guess. That is the way ETS weaves in experimental questions on the GRE®, unlike the way GMAC™ tosses in randomized per-quarter experimental questions on the GMAT™. Yes, Quant is not as challenging in comparison (for most test-takers), although certain niche topics (such as intersections and unions of sets) are tested in ways that do not come up on the GMAT™.

The Verbal section is vocabulary-dependent, although I like to say that it is more important to be a good reader than it is to be a wordsmith. Understanding the type of word that fits the context of a Sentence Equivalence or Text Completion question is vital to success. That said, many upper-level test-takers spend weeks or even months memorizing lists of arcane words to mitigate the chance of seeing something unfamiliar and hitting the panic button. I am guessing that if you missed just two questions, you walked away with no less than a 168, a phenomenal raw score if so.

Regarding the essays, as long as you remember to leave yourself out of one of them and voice your own views in the other, you can approach them in pretty much the same way. A 5.5 is a great result for an unpracticed effort, and, as is the case with the GMAT™, no admissions committee holds the AWA score in high regard anyway (not that you have ever indicated any intention of applying to business schools).

The big question: Do you plan on taking the GRE® again? Would you prepare for it if so? How about the GMAT™?

Once again, I wish you good luck in your pursuits.

- Andrew
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Toughest practice tests 10 Sep 2021, 11:48
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S2021S
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Thank you!

I think I will purchase the Enhanced Score Report if it would tell which questions I got wrong or provide feedback on the essay. I just looked it up on the Store and it seems to only provide 'Percentage of questions answered correctly', which I know (sort of) already, 'Time management', which I'm well aware of (I had ~5.5 minutes, ~2.5 minutes and a mere 12 seconds left on the clock on Quant, Verbal and IR respectively) as I glance up at the clock every few minutes to do a quick check on my current speed vs required speed (I tend to be slower/more careful in the first half of exams/sections, so this is necessary), 'Performance by question type', which is also something I'm aware of (2, or perhaps 3, wrong in Verbal- likely in Sentence Correction and/or Critical Reasoning because, iirc, I'm yet to get a question wrong in 'Reading Comprehension' in the mocks and the passages yesterday were easy, as usual and either 0 or 1 wrong in Quantitative - I don't remember the questions well enough to be able to say 'oh, it was this one that I got wrong' if I'm simply told that the one incorrect was in, say, algebra).

It does promise a 'Performance by difficulty type' and this might be useful to some extent as I can then guess (only approximately, of course) how the algorithm calculates the score to be, say, a 46 instead of a 47 (someone somewhere has done this analysis already, most likely). But if they don't give essay feedback or identification of the questions answered incorrectly, this alone is not enough to purchase the report :). Btw, is the Hard-Medium-Easy a GMAT official classification or is it the case that they use, say, 5 levels of difficulty and since they won't publish the algorithm, Hard-Medium-Easy is used by us (students, tutors, prep providers, etc.) as a useful and mostly accurate proxy?
Hello again, S2021S. The ESR will not tell you "which questions [you] got wrong or provide feedback on the essay." The "Performance by Difficulty Type" is also misleading: a graph shows Average Difficulty through each quarter of the section. Since you missed so few questions, you will probably see a purple dot somewhere between Medium and High, and that is it. The categories of questions are also broad in scope, particularly in Quant. What, exactly, do any of the following mean? (And these are the only categories listed on an ESR.)

  • Geometry
  • Rates/Ratio/Percent
  • Value/Order/Factors
  • Equal./Inequal./Alg.
  • Counting/Sets/Series

If, for instance, you missed a geometry question that incorporated variables or inequalities (perhaps some shaded region in a graph), into which category is that question placed? Just Geometry, or perhaps both Geometry and Equal...? And within the latter, was it the inequality that proved troublesome, or the algebra? Unless you remember the question, you have nothing to lean on. The ESR is of more use for students scoring below a 750, when more errors or timing issues may lead to more discussion points.

I would suggest reading this post on the GMAT Ninja website or simply watching the embedded video at the bottom of that page to better understand what the ESR does and does not tell you.

- Andrew



Thanks - I've decided not to purchase the ESR.

To answer your question (and I apologize for the very late reply), I'm not a native English speaker but, like many others in my country (or at least the more urban parts of it), I've had much of my formal education in English. Besides, I grew up watching a lot of international sports (the commentary is invariably in English), TV shows, and a bit of Hollywood. So, English is pretty much like a second native tongue - if a person doesn't know my name and talks to me on the phone, they wouldn't be able to tell that I'm not a native speaker. In fact, I never learnt the formal rules of English grammar (for example, I had no clue what a 'participle' or a 'gerund' was before I started learning other foreign languages a few years back) - I just rely on habit and 'feel'.

That said, my English writing skills have been on a slow decline due to disuse. Ten years or so back, I was writing regularly - I had four or five blogs (which I later took down because only an embarrassingly small number of people, a majority of them my real-life friends, were reading it!), was a regular contributor to online forum discussions, etc. - nowadays, I hardly write anything other than work-related stuff (emails, technical papers, etc.) and social media posts. And a decade of autocorrect and spellcheck have done to my spelling what Excel did to my ability to multiply large numbers (I was great at these things when I was a teenager), etc. :(
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Thank you for your detailed response and great to learn more about your background and how your proficiency in verbal developed.

I would also like to congratulate you again for your GMAT score and wish you all the best for your future endeavors. Cheers!
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S2021S
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Toughest practice tests 12 Sep 2021, 21:04
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S2021S
Very off-topic since this is a GMAT forum but I took the GRE the previous Wednesday (Sep 1st), 3.5 days after the GMAT. Was curious about the GRE and spent the day after the GMAT reading opinions about it - the consensus seemed to be that it was much easier than the GMAT, so I decided to book an exam for the earliest available slot. Didn't have the time to do any mock exams but, in hindsight, they were not required anyway.

The math sections must have been the easiest math I've done since I was ~11-12 years old (otoh, GMAT math is genuinely interesting and non-trivial) and had 12 to 16 minutes left on the clock on each of the three math sections (GRE gives the option to 'review' your answers in case you want to change any - I rechecked the answers a couple of times, then got bored and clicked on 'Next').

Didn't quite manage a perfect score on the Verbal (ran out of time on one of the two sections and had to blindly click on some answer choice for the last two questions - pretty sure these were the only two I got wrong in the whole exam; was going at the GMAT pace of ~ 1.75 minutes per question - GRE needs 1.5 min/Q on Verbal- and didn't realize that I was running out of time, else would have sped up on some of the earlier questions instead of checking twice or thrice that I've got the correct answer!), but felt it was slightly easier than or around the same level of toughness as the GMAT Verbal. GRE Verbal does require one to know fairly obscure words (I'm comfortable with these - I would back myself to know the meaning of >90-95% of the more complicated words from a standard dictionary - but even if a student isn't aware of these words from prior exposure, I guess he/she can, given sufficient preparation time, easily memorize these?) but is otherwise quite similar to GMAT Verbal.

Interestingly, they have two 30-minute essays on the GRE - one is very GMAT-like (where they ask you to find faults with the reasoning of someone, usually something like "company A is trying to increase its profits, the CEO has proposal X and it is based on Y") and the other one on a more general topic, one that involves expressing shades of political and/or philosophical opinion (I love these topics, because I have strong views on these, and because these topics allow one to draw on real-world examples). Got a 5.5, which is slightly better than my GMAT essay score - pretty sure this is down to the latter essay.
Interesting experiment, S2021S. Since you encountered three Quant sections, you can be confident that one of them was entirely experimental—which one is your best guess. That is the way ETS weaves in experimental questions on the GRE®, unlike the way GMAC™ tosses in randomized per-quarter experimental questions on the GMAT™. Yes, Quant is not as challenging in comparison (for most test-takers), although certain niche topics (such as intersections and unions of sets) are tested in ways that do not come up on the GMAT™.

The Verbal section is vocabulary-dependent, although I like to say that it is more important to be a good reader than it is to be a wordsmith. Understanding the type of word that fits the context of a Sentence Equivalence or Text Completion question is vital to success. That said, many upper-level test-takers spend weeks or even months memorizing lists of arcane words to mitigate the chance of seeing something unfamiliar and hitting the panic button. I am guessing that if you missed just two questions, you walked away with no less than a 168, a phenomenal raw score if so.

Regarding the essays, as long as you remember to leave yourself out of one of them and voice your own views in the other, you can approach them in pretty much the same way. A 5.5 is a great result for an unpracticed effort, and, as is the case with the GMAT™, no admissions committee holds the AWA score in high regard anyway (not that you have ever indicated any intention of applying to business schools).

The big question: Do you plan on taking the GRE® again? Would you prepare for it if so? How about the GMAT™?

Once again, I wish you good luck in your pursuits.

- Andrew
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Ah.. I wish they didn't have these experimental sections.. the exam is long enough already (it took nearly 5 hours from entering the test centre to exiting it - even without the experimental section, it would have been like ~4.5 hours)

Yes, it was a 168; btw, the GRE doesn't seem to give a composite score unlike the GMAT (I took a look again at the official score report I got 2-3 days back and it just says 168, 170 and 5.5, with corresponding percentiles) - it will be nice to have an overall score and percentile.

I don't feel like taking the GRE again (too easy, imho), or at least that is how I feel right now (these things can change on an impulse!).. the GMAT, yes.. will return to it some time (likely to be a few months from now, will update here when I do :-)), hope to prepare a little bit and do the remaining 3 mocks and see if I can get 800 consistently before jumping on to a real exam.
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