Toughest practice tests

Hello, S2021S. First off, if a 770 is your baseline, then that puts you near the top of the list of all-time raw scores. Even those who end up in the 99th percentile often start no higher than the mid-600s. Since earning those next 20-30 points will be far more difficult for you than for someone else looking to go from, say, a 670-680 to a 700, you will have to humble yourself when studying your weaker areas and be especially diligent about tracking your errors (getting to the root of what had caused you to make them). You should also understand that completing more and more questions will provide diminishing returns after an initial period in which you will gain more familiarity with the format of the test itself (and probably increase your score by 10 points). I agree with Gmatisking above that in-house GMAT Club questions provide the toughest GMAT™-like Quant questions. They are expertly written in that they often build from basic concepts and incorporate the same traps that more challenging official questions do. Manhattan Prep Quant questions have a reputation for being more involved—i.e. time-intensive—but not necessarily similar to their official counterparts. Both Manhattan Prep and Veritas Prep Verbal questions also provide a challenge but are somewhat different in flavor from official questions. There is nearly universal agreement within the dedicated tutoring community that official questions provide by far the best training for the exam. Quant provides a more diverse array of options. In addition to those mentioned earlier, many members of the site sing the praises of questions they have encountered through Target Test Prep. Although I cannot personally vouch for the material, I have helped students with questions they have brought up to me from the platform, and I have always seen a sound method behind the questions and explanations. I also cannot deny the number of Q50-51 scorers who have mentioned their TTP training as an integral part of their preparation. So, in the end, you have to ask yourself, Is harder necessarily better for the task at hand?

You may be interested in the Quiz mode you can access through this site. Not only is it free for a week and relatively inexpensive thereafter, but you can also customize the questions you practice, allowing you to design a mock using official questions (if you so chose), up to fifty at a time. (You could design one section at a time.) To answer your query about the official practice exams, you can simply reset mocks 1 and 2 as many times as you wish, free of charge, so there would be no need to register a new account. Although the question pool on these two mocks is quite deep, if you test at a similar level, you will likely see repeat questions, and your results might therefore be unrepresentative. Purchasing mocks 3-6 is an option that will provide the best practice for predictive purposes, but the question pool is rather narrow, and you can only reset each exam once.

I think you have the right idea of treating this task as a game. To master the exam, you cannot let it get the upper hand on you mentally. Often, when high-aspiring students put too much pressure on themselves to earn an 800, they try to be cautious to avoid making any mistakes, and they walk away with little more than stories of why they flatlined. (Yes, a 770 can be seen as a failure in the eyes of some of these people, and I think you can understand such a mentality.) When people place trust in their training, however, and when that training is sufficient for the purpose, the sky is the limit. Yes, you will have to answer every graded question correctly to earn an 800—remember, there are experimental questions on the actual exam that do not count toward the total score—but I like to say that anyone who can get to within three questions of the mark can, on another day under slightly different circumstances, walk away with a quite different story.

Good luck with your studies, however you choose to go about them.

- Andrew