Tag Archives: GMAT official guide

GMAT Focus Stinks

Posted on March 11, 2010 | Leave a comment

In a previous post , I gave a qualified endorsement of GMAT Focus, which is a series of 24-question quant tests sold by the makers of the GMAT.  GMAT Focus consists of retired test questions, and I was pretty convinced that the test is a useful product, since so many real GMAT test questions seem to (very, very strongly) resemble questions seen on GMAT Focus.

The only trouble is that the tests are too short, overpriced (in my opinion), oddly timed (24 questions in 45 minutes?  huh?), and a little bit of a rip-off, since some of the questions also appear in the GMAT official guide and quantitative review.  If you don’t believe me, click here to see a brief discussion of this in a Manhattan GMAT forum.

Over the past year, I’ve strongly encouraged my students do use GMAT Focus, but I think it’s time to advise everybody to stay away from it.  Believe it or not, one of my students just took a GMAT Focus test that had 14 questions that overlapped with the official guide (12th edition) or the quant review book (2nd edition).  That means that only 10 of them were fresh questions.  Dude, my poor GMAT student totally got ripped off.

(Luckily, my student didn’t recognize all of the questions, and still missed 6 of the 14 repeats.  It’s safe to say that he still got a good math workout; it’s also safe to say that his GMAT tutor needs to kick his butt a little bit harder.)

Here’s the complete list of questions that appeared on this particular GMAT Focus test:

  • official guide DS #33, 45, 48 (though I found it interesting that they removed the reference to the year 1989 in that question), 66, 70, 75, and 76
  • official guide PS #48, 81, and 89
  • quantitative review DS #33
  • quantitative review PS #142, 146, and 147

And if you’re curious, here’s the complete list of GMAT Focus repeats that I’ve marked over past few months:

  • official guide DS:  #44, 45, 52, 53, 62, 66, 68, 70, 75, 76, 79, 82, 87, 90, 94, 110, 121, 123
  • official guide PS:  #73, 74, 81, 89, 107, 117, 148, 163
  • quantitative review DS: #11, 33, 122
  • quantitative review PS:  #142, 146, 147

I’m sure that I haven’t caught everything, but this should be enough to convince you that GMAT Focus probably isn’t worth $25 per test.

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GMAT Focus quirks

Posted on August 26, 2009 | 1 Comment

For the most part, I’m a fan of GMAC, the company that produces the GMAT. I’ve spent a good chunk of the last decade working as an SAT, ACT, GRE, and TOEFL tutor, and I respect that fact that the GMAT is much more complicated, precise, and nuanced than any of the aforementioned exams. And GMAC is also fairly generous about publishing retired test questions; some of us whine about the GMAT OG’s lack of hard questions, but the official guides for GRE and TOEFL are far worse, offering only a handful of (ancient, moldy) practice questions. So while I generally think that GMAC does its job really, really well, they seem to have been a little bit sloppy with GMAT Focus lately.

In some ways, GMAT Focus is the best of the GMAT practice material. Sure, it’s overpriced ($25 for one test, or $65 for three… basically, you’ll pay almost $1 per question). And I think it’s weird that they sell the tests in groups of three–you can actually take the test four times before questions start to repeat. And you’re given only 45 minutes to complete 24 questions–a little bit odd, since you’ll ultimately need to get used to doing 37 GMAT questions in 75 minutes. But GMAT Focus still contains an impressive bank of difficult, fresh GMAT questions; I’m convinced that GMAT Focus questions are much closer to the real thing than any other practice resource available. If you’re serious about improving your quant score, GMAT Focus is absolutely not optional.

Unfortunately, the GMAT Focus questions are no longer all that unique. Many of them appear in the 12th edition of the official guide, and I have a funny feeling that even more will show up in the next edition of the Quantitative Review guide. So you might be paying $1 for questions that you’ve already purchased in another book. That’s really annoying, especially if you’re already paying for a GMAT tutor.

Even more annoying: the GMAT Focus might not be as representative of the real test as I once thought. For a long time, it seemed that the GMAT Focus would give you a pretty good idea of the composition of the quantitative section–specifically, GMAT Focus included a lot more tricky logic, combinatorics, and “creative algebra” questions than the official guides, and GMAT Focus seemed to be an extremely accurate representation of the actual test. Sadly, something might have shifted, at least a little bit. In the past month, several of my students (all with quant raw scores above 40) whined that the real test didn’t have any of the tough combination/permutation/probability questions that appear on GMAT Focus. It makes me wonder whether the GMAT Focus is becoming somehow less indicative of the actual test. Again, I find that a little bit irritating–if it’s actually true.

Here’s the strangest report of all: one of my GMAT students swears that he saw a GMAT Focus question on the real exam last weekend. He claims that the question was absolutely identical, with the same numbers and everything. He didn’t share the details of the question (that would be illegal), but I find that pretty alarming if it’s true. Is GMAC getting sloppy? Was the “retread” GMAT Focus question tossed back into the real test as some sort of experiment, or as a statistical control for other questions? Or was my student just hallucinating after a long, stressful few hours of test-taking?

Either way, it’s interesting. I still think that it’s worth spending $90 for all four GMAT Focus tests, but I couldn’t really blame a budget-conscious GMAT student who comes to a different conclusion.

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GMAT Verbal Review 2nd Edition

Posted on August 13, 2009 | 1 Comment

Fresh off the presses: our friends at GMAT just released the 2nd edition of the GMAT Verbal Review. This time, they’ve switched to a sexy blue theme. Much nicer than the lavender on the 1st edition.

Aside from the color change, not a whole lot is different. Most of the questions are the same, but they supposedly removed 75 questions and replaced them with 75 new ones. But actually… they removed 82 questions and replaced them with 82 new ones. You get 7 more real GMAT questions than they promised! Isn’t that exciting?

If you’re looking for some extra verbal practice material, it probably wouldn’t hurt to have an additional 82 “official” questions, especially since the book is so cheap (about $13 on Amazon). But do the lords of the GMAT give us any special hints in the new edition? Are there any systematic changes that might hint at a new composition of the actual test questions?

Unfortunately, not really. I spent a good chunk of time poring over the new questions, and I can’t say that all that much is substantially different. It’s not as if the new GMAT verbal guide is suddenly covered with, say, parallelism questions. It is, however, covered with balsamic vinaigrette. At least my copy is. (A little salad accident happened while I was working through the book. That was my punishment for ordering a salad, I guess.)

Anyhow, here’s a breakdown, by question type:

Reading Comprehension

Questions removed from the 1st edition: 13, 22-28, 55-63, 91-97, 98-105 (32 questions removed)

Questions added to the 2nd edition: 1-6, 18-23, 45-49, 64-70, 91-97 (31 questions added)

Random edits: a few typos were fixed (missing punctuation on 1st edition #40 and #51), indentations were added at the beginning of each passage, and line references were changed as a result (#48, #50, #74, #76, #102). Yes, I’m that anal. Want me to edit your MBA application essays?

Useful conclusions: none, really. I thought it was interesting that they removed a pair of random questions (1st edition #13 and #65) while keeping the rest of the passage intact, but I don’t think that leads us to any stunning conclusions about the makeup of the test. The five new passages include two science readings, two “business-y” readings, and one social science-y passage about W.E.B. DuBois. These replaced four passages, including one science reading, two business-y readings, and one social science-y passage about Florence Nightengale. As a tutor who spends way too much time with these books, I have to admit that I’ll miss Florence.

Brutally honest conclusion #1: anybody get the feeling that GMAC released this new edition just to sell books?

Brutally honest conclusion #2: I’m not serious about missing the Florence Nightengale passage.

Critical Reasoning

Questions removed from the 1st edition: 1, 2, 5, 8, 13, 15, 19, 22-23, 29, 35, 42-43, 46, 54, 55, 59, 60, 66, 68, 77, 82 (22 questions removed)

Questions added to the 2nd edition: 1, 3, 6, 9, 13, 17, 21, 25, 29, 33, 37, 40, 45, 48, 51, 54, 59, 62, 65, 70, 74, 78, 81 (23 questions added)

Random edits: underlining was removed from questions 24, 26, 27, 49, and 79 in the 1st edition. Not that you care, but it looks like some editor at GMAC had to work overtime once or twice.

Useful conclusions: actually, I do see a few semi-significant changes in the critical reasoning part of the test. There are now two (wow!) of the “boldfaced” questions, compared with one in the 1st edition. In the 1st edition, there were six “paired” questions attached to a single passage; all of those have been removed, or at least converted to single questions.

More generally, I think that GMAC has been experimenting with a broader range of question stems for critical reasoning. Once upon a time, CR didn’t go much beyond some basic “strengthen” and “weaken” questions; other phrasings (see 2nd edition #70 and #78) are a little bit more common than they used to be. This doesn’t radically alter the test, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

Sentence Correction

Questions removed from the 1st edition: 3, 14, 17, 18, 21, 24, 27, 28, 33, 36, 38, 43, 47, 50, 52, 54, 55, 58, 59, 69, 74, 75, 77, 81, 83, 87, 89, 90 (28 questions removed)

Questions added to the 2nd edition: 1, 5, 8, 11, 14, 17, 22, 27, 31, 36, 42, 45, 50, 53, 57, 61, 65, 69, 73, 79, 84, 88, 92, 96, 100, 104, 108, 112 (28 questions added)

Useful conclusions: none, really. For the past couple of years, I’ve theorized that the GMAT is trying to make their sentence correction questions more “test-prep proof” by inserting more questions that involve some sort of tricky logic, unusually difficult comparisons, or funny forms of parallelism (i.e. false parallelism traps or opaque parallel structures). I also think that we’re starting to see more idioms, and fewer questions that can be solved just by knowing simple grammar and usage rules.

Although my students continue to tell me that the sentence correction questions on the real test are much harder than in the GMAT official guides, the 2nd edition of the Verbal Review gives us pretty much nothing. The new 28 questions don’t seem to be significantly harder than the 28 that were deleted from the 1st edition. The last few new ones aren’t exactly a walk in the park, but they’re still nowhere near the difficulty level of some of the evil stuff I’ve seen on the real test.

So there you have it. If you’re being really aggressive about your GMAT prep, you might want to buy both books, and then use the question lists above to cherry-pick the non-redundant questions out of one of the books. Other than that, there’s no particular reason to think that the 2nd edition offers anything all that special. If you’re confident with your verbal skills, there’s no need to race to the local bookstore for the 2nd edition–if the 1st is already in your hot little hands, you probably won’t need to bother with the 2nd.

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exhausting the OGs: a case study

Posted on July 22, 2009 | 3 Comments

As a private GMAT tutor who presents himself in unconventional ways, I tend to attract unusual students. People who are “average” or “typical” tend to do well in prep classes; there’s no need for them to pay for a private GMAT tutor. Often, I find that I’m the GMAT resource of last resort. I get lots of calls from people who have already done everything they can (self-study, prep courses, perhaps repeated re-takings of the GMAT) and can’t think of anything else, so they call an independent tutor, hoping that I can offer some help.

Usually, I immediately have an idea of what to do for a student. Some people complain about their GMAT verbal scores, but haven’t had a lick of SC grammar training–it’s easy to see that there is, at the very least, a content issue in these cases. Some students reveal major deficiencies in their math preparations, and these are also easy enough to fix. I’m about to start working with a student who has scored 330 and 430 on her first two practice tests, and is in the middle of a prep class; at least as a starting point, she just needs a little bit of one-on-one attention to help her grasp some fundamental concepts and build her confidence. Basically, there’s an obvious starting point with nearly every GMAT student I’ve ever worked with, and I can usually figure that out over the phone.

But when I first came to NYC last month, I met a student who might, in some ways, know more about the GMAT than I do. This guy has done every single official GMAT question (OG 11, OG 12, Verbal Review, Quant Review, GMATPrep, GMAT Focus)… twice. And he’s taken all of the Manhattan GMAT tests twice. He kept a journal of all of his mistakes. And he’s taken the real GMAT test twice. I couldn’t ask for a more thorough course of self-study.

Strangely, the poor guy (let’s call him Mr. V) is stuck with a sub-650 score, with particularly weak outcomes on the verbal section (low 40s on quant, but he was right around 30 on the verbal). Apparently, Mr. V called two other independent GMAT tutors before contacting me, and both said that they couldn’t do anything to help him. And I can understand why. What can possibly be done to help this guy, when he has apparently left no stone unturned? He has a strong work background, but is aiming for a 700+ GMAT score so that he can have a shot at top schools. Jumping from, say, 620 to 700 is no joke under the best of circumstances, but it’s one hell of a task for a student who has already devoured everything that GMAC has ever published.

I was honest with Mr. V from the start: I’m not sure how well any of this will work, but I gave him a smorgasbord of options. Ultimately, we decided to do a full run-through of all of the key grammar concepts on sentence correction, as well as a quick tour through the math content to see if we could find any holes in his understanding of the fundamentals. Beyond that, we realized that we needed to squeeze every possible drop of knowledge out of the official GMAT material, and we had to find some way to supplement the verbal content with outside sources.

For sentence correction, I’m forcing poor Mr. V to identify every single mistake in every wrong answer choice. Much of the material in the OGs is far easier than what he saw on the actual GMAT, and I realized that he probably hadn’t really trained himself to find every type of error. I think this approach is driving him nuts, but seems to be helping somewhat. (I’ve given the same assignment to other students, with mixed results.)

On the math section, we’ve discovered that Mr. V is an algebra genius, but that he gets tripped up by some of the logic- and word-based material. Combinations, permutations, conditional probability, and venn diagram questions tend to make him see double. So we’re working through some methods to make him more systematic in his approaches to those questions, and we’re both digging around to find as many additional, 700-level problems as we can for those topics.

The other two GMAT verbal sections, as is often the case, have proven to be more problematic. I’ve shown Mr. V several different tactics for approaching GMAT critical reasoning, most of which involve creating some sort of visual guide for navigating the questions. I’m not sure how well the tactics themselves are working, but we decided to make him suffer through LSAT logical reasoning questions alongside the OG critical reasoning material. At worst, the LSAT material will make the GMAT seem a little bit easier and more straightforward; I hope that he’ll look at the verbal section of the actual GMAT and be a little bit less intimidated by the convoluted language. At best, a steady practice diet of LSAT might actually cure him of his logical errors.

Mr. V’s test date is still a few weeks away, and I’ll probably be almost as nervous as he will be. I’ve certainly helped some unique individuals reach their MBA goals, but Mr. V has forced us to rewrite the GMAT test prep playbook. I just hope that the first draft of the new playbook is good enough to get him the points he needs to achieve his MBA goals. I’m fascinated, and will update this page with his progress.

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