characterstics of 800 level question??

Question

Let's say in RC of verbal I got two paras one is 30 lines and other is 50 lines. The para with 30 line contains the life story of Abraham Lincoln with simple and more generic questions. The para with 50 lines is about NASA scientists working in a specific project with specifc terms and very deep inference related questions. Now in above example we can clearly say that para with 30 line is of medium difficulty and para with 50 lines is of high difficulty. But how do we know that any difficult question is of 690-700 level or 750-760 level or 790-800 level?

How do we know that any question, if attempted right, will confirm 100th percentile? I mean as we know that overall algorthim in GMAT determine the percentile but in general there are only two category of question; simple and difficult then How do we know that particular difficult question is 800 level?

Please post the characterstics of 800 level questions.

CD181 · Answer

I am interested in this as well.

BarneyStinson · Answer

I don't think it is for you to know how difficult the question is. Trust me, all questions as long as you don't know the approach to answer it are actually equally difficult. When you know the procedures to simplify a given question, be it quant or verbal, the questions tend to get easier.

The question difficulty is meant for the CAT to classify you, the test taker, as belonging to a certain percentile set of people. And to achieve this, the CAT simply bombards you with so many different kinds of questions for which simplification procedures vary at an alarmingly large degree. The test is all about how much confused it can get you and how much you can prevent it from happening. Do not focus on difficulty levels of the question, focus on cracking the gist of the test, the process of simplifying every question that comes your way to beat it out-of-shape.

DestinyChild · Answer

Its like setting score on golf course; curator creates the difficulty and proposes the par... and then it is changed based on statistical testing of people with certain par handling that hole...!

Also not sure I personally agree with more lines to be a guarantee for 800 level question. 1-2 complex sentences can throw you off and 50 lines may not...!

In the end not sure if the discussion is worth taking anywhere unless someone is looking to create CAT software or algorithm itself...!

Well in retrospective, this thought may still have its charm if it shows up on our AWA

what are the odds?

bb · Answer

As a test taker you won't know the difficulty of the questions.
There are many ways to make questions difficult - question type (for example a rare/harder question such as probability), wording/setup, non-typical questions(you have never seen anything like that before and don't have an approach to solving it - see gmat club tests for some of these), subtle differences in verbal (such as being outside the scope), long convoluted passages (in verbal), subtle grammar (idiom) errors.

It is very hard to create good hard questions and stay within the rules. GMAC spends $1,200 per question (on average).

characterstics of 800 level question??

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