GMAT Prep Reinstall

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GMAT Prep Reinstall

by durgesh79 » Wed Jun 18, 2008 9:21 am
I came across this interesting post on another GMAT forum. It shows how we can utilise GMAT prep to its fulleset extent. I havent tried it, but looks like it'll work.

Here is the link https://gmatclub.com/forum/1-t28548

If outside links are not allowed, below is the text version.

==============================================

This post covers a few different tricks. Look for the bolded sections and see if any of it interests you

Ever wondered if you could re-use the GMATPrep exams and get new questions?


If you try to uninstall the GMATPrep software and then re-install, you will notice that the exams still appear "used". Frustrating? Is there a way around it?

Yes.

To re-use the GMATPrep exam software and reset the question sets:

1. Uninstall the GMATPrep software.
2. Navigate to C:\Program Files\GMATPrep
3. You will find a directory called exams
4. Rename this directory to old_exams (ideally copy it somewhere else too just in case)
5. Re-install the GMATPrep software.

The GMATPRep software will now think you've never taken the practice exams and you can now take two new exams.

I did this and never saw a repeat math question. I saw some repeat verbals, but mostly due to the fact that I've done almost all the OG verbal questions front to back, a lot of them are pulled from here.

How to review your old exams even after re-installing

Backup the existing copy of exams in C:\Program Files\GMATPrep to another directory.
Copy the files in old_exams back into the exams directory
Relaunch GMATPrep. It will now load your old exams and you can review those. So you can take the exam four, five, six, seven times ... and always have your old problems to go back to.

Want to know which questions you flaked back and forth on?


1. Open the c:\program files\gmatprep\exams directory.
2. Copy the exam logs. These are called practice test 1.log and practice test 2.log
3. Open the files in notepad.
4. Locate the section that reads:

2006-04-16 14.12.23.989:INFO :Item "QuantInstruction1" presented

Immediately after that, you will find:

2006-04-16 14.12.25.208:INFO :Navigate next requested

This is now your first Math question.

You will see something like:

2006-04-16 14.12.15.451:INFO :Item "187:009380" eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].
2006-04-16 14.12.55.438:INFO :Item "187:009380" presented
2006-04-16 14.13.23.515:INFO :Selecting response option D

This means you selected D.

You picked one answer and only one answer and hit submit.

If you see:

2006-04-16 14.34.99.324:INFO :Item "187:008920" presented
2006-04-16 14.35.28.230:INFO :Selecting response option A
2006-04-16 14.35.38.327:INFO :Selecting response option C
2006-04-16 14.37.54.208:INFO :Selecting response option A
2006-04-16 14.37.49.304:INFO :Selecting response option C

This means you went back and forth on options A and C.

Which question is this? Count the number of times you see "Item:" from the line "INFO :Item "QuantInstruction1" presented". The number of times you see it = the number of questions you answered. So in this case, if I saw Item: "....." 13 times before this section above, I know that question 14 had me going back and forth.

Same thing for verbal:

2006-04-16 15.29.45.218:INFO :Item "VerbalInstruction1" presented
2006-04-16 15.29.40.035:INFO :Navigate next requested
2006-04-16 15.29.40.156:INFO :Item "188:002908" eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].
2006-04-16 15.29.40.163:INFO :Item "188:002908" presented
2006-04-16 15.30.31.671:INFO :Selecting response option D
2006-04-16 15.30.23.634:INFO :Navigate next requested

Means I selected option D.
You are looking for the lines that say "presented" or lines that contain a set of choices. Lines that read:

2006-04-16 15.41.45.518:INFO :Item "188:000009-04" eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].
2006-04-16 15.41.45.528:INFO :Selection set "188:000009" eligibility from STRICT to NONE (responsible child: "188:000009-04" - [SELECTED]).
2006-04-16 15.41.55.538:INFO :Item "188:000009-01" eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].
2006-04-16 15.41.75.528:INFO :Item "188:000009-07" eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].
2006-04-16 15.41.15.518:INFO :Item "188:000009-05" eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].

Mean that you were presented question 188:000009 and options 01,04,07,05 were random answer choice selections. This counts as one question.

When you see something like this:

2006-04-16 15.58.26.311:INFO :Item "188:000553-01" presented
2006-04-16 16.01.32.121:INFO :Selecting response option A
2006-04-16 16.01.43.833:INFO :Selecting response option C
2006-04-16 16.01.31.254:INFO :Selecting response option E
2006-04-16 16.02.61.735:INFO :Selecting response option A
2006-04-16 16.02.14.641:INFO :Selecting response option B
2006-04-16 16.02.21.859:INFO :Selecting response option D

You know you really had a hard time picking!

How to match your incorrect questions with questions that you flaked on - a quick way to review


There is any easy way to do this. REVIEW ALL THE QUESTIONS YOU GOT WRONG IN BOTH VERBAL AND MATH.
Then close the GMAtPrep software and open up the software log.

Find:
2006-04-16 16.30.14.383:INFO :Item "EXIT" presented
2006-04-16 16.30.34.156:INFO :Navigate next requested
2006-04-16 16.30.25.452:INFO :Review screen displayed.

You are now reviewing your exam.

2006-04-16 16.30.29.235:INFO :Review incorrect items requested
2006-04-16 16.30.11.344:INFO :Item "187:003387" presented

This means that I got item 187:003387 wrong.

So now just go to the top of the file and search for 187:003387

2006-04-16 14.13.12.124:INFO :Item "187:003387" eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].
2006-04-16 14.13.33.367:INFO :Item "187:003387" presented
2006-04-16 14.15.45.116:INFO :Selecting response option B

This means I did not flake on this question. I selected only option B and hit next. I was wrong though.

What does eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED]. mean?

Good question.

I've seen both eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].
and eligibility from STRICT to LENIENT - [ENEMY].

I do not know what they mean, but labelling a question as "enemy" seems really appropriate don't you think? Last curious tidbit. The current version of GMATPrep had its exam questions defined on 12/06/05. I think I may have found a way to get COMPLETELY different question sets going once they update the software, which I presume they will do at least once a year. If that happens, I think that within a year or two (no benefit to us unfortunately) it might be possible to have several full sets of exam questions from previous versions of GMATPrep.

Anyone here download the GMATPrep software prior to 12/06/2005?

Enjoy!!

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by beatthegmat » Fri Jun 20, 2008 9:05 am
Wow, thanks for sharing. Very impressive investigation done by this person.
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by arunmmw » Sat Jun 21, 2008 3:07 am
My observation is even without gprep reinstall, if we havent saved the exam result, we can use it multiple times.

I have done gmat prep almost 20 times and played with gprep. I have seen atleast 500 different questions.
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by rosh26 » Sun Jun 22, 2008 1:11 pm
Hi All,

I have done this and it works!

The only thing I have found is that the AWA topics repeat from the first time I took them.

Can anyone else speak to this? Do AWA's always repeat no matter how many times you reinstall?

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by arunmmw » Mon Jun 23, 2008 12:25 am
AWA question hasn't changed for me ever.

I played with Gprep by delibrately answering questions incorrectly and i found many new questions propped up, and when i answered every questions correct i found new/harder questions.

In fact i analyzed the gprep and found that if we answer mutiple questions incorrectly in a row we lose our score faster than we normally do.

On one instance i answered all CR and SC questions correct and RC questions incorrect and my verbal score was 16.
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by canada_sms » Wed Jan 14, 2009 1:13 pm
So if I'm reading this correctly, you don't really get a new question bank by removing the exams folder and re-installing rather it just let's you take the GMATPrep exams again. If you are steadily improving over time than you should be able to see new more difficult problems from the question bank.

Here's something that I was just thinking about (just an idea that I haven't tried). Say you have VMWare running a Windows XP virtual machine that has GMATPrep installed and a LOT of diskspace. As you are taking the test you could take snapshots of the virtual machine and then go back and examine which question you would get next if you answered correctly vs. incorrectly.

This isn't a task that I would undertake since time is better spent studying. I would imagine that such a technique on a grand scale could allow someone to completely map out the question choice tree and experiment with the scoring algorithm though they would be wasting a crapload of their life and energy.

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by gmat1974 » Sun Mar 28, 2010 7:57 pm
WINDOWS VISTA INSTRUCTIONS FROM GMAT CLUB:

GMAT Prep "Reset" - Reinstall in Windows Vista (Special thanks: to bigoyal for researching this)
1. Basically same as above only GMATPrep creates folder in following location:
C:\Users\{user_name}\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files\GMATPrep\exams
Note: {user_name} is your user name, it will vary from system to system
2. Usually you can go directly to AppData folder by typing in "%appdata" - in explorer window
3. Make sure explorer shows hidden files

See
https://gmatclub.com/forum/gmatprep-gmat ... 77548.html

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by FC » Mon Mar 29, 2010 4:03 am
arunmmw wrote:AWA question hasn't changed for me ever.

I played with Gprep by delibrately answering questions incorrectly and i found many new questions propped up, and when i answered every questions correct i found new/harder questions.

In fact i analyzed the gprep and found that if we answer mutiple questions incorrectly in a row we lose our score faster than we normally do.

On one instance i answered all CR and SC questions correct and RC questions incorrect and my verbal score was 16.
I faced some very similar results. It seems that RC has more weight on the overall score than SC or CR. For example, if you have 9 wrong questions like 0CR, 2RC and 7SC, your score will be around 40-42, but if you on contrary have 0CR-7RC-2SC your score will barely stay within the 35-39 range.

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by bluebird42 » Wed Aug 24, 2011 12:24 pm
Long shot here.. but is it possible to retrieve my questions/answers if I accidentally hit the "don't save" button? ie. Can I edit the log files to have the program get back my choices for a practice test?

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by bluebird42 » Wed Aug 24, 2011 4:53 pm
Oh wow, so I could retrieve my answers, but it has more to do with a Windows Vista setting instead of tinkering with the GMATPrep logs - I restored the entire folder through Folder Properties > Previous Versions to the snapshot of the folder right after I had completed the test. Good times.

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by vivek_85 » Mon Oct 03, 2011 3:10 pm
Does anyone know how to reset the GMATPrep exams in Windows 7?

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by jjk3431 » Tue May 07, 2013 8:40 am
I wanted to share my experience of taking the test after re-installing the software.

After taking the first 2 tests, I uninstalled and looked for the "GMAT Prep" folder that other people in the forum recommend to delete as well. The folder was deleted automatically.
I looked for hidden folders and deleted all the hidden folders that were in my computer.

I downloaded the software again and retook the test.
For the Quant section, 12 questions were repeated.
For the Verbal section, 11 questions were repeated. (Excluding the RC repeats. 2 RC passages were repeated)

I believe those 23 questions were summation of repeated questions from the GMAT Prep 1 & 2. I'm not exactly sure how many questions were repeated from just one test.

Has anyone experienced this many repeats?

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by sw222 » Sun Oct 12, 2014 4:57 am
durgesh79 wrote:I came across this interesting post on another GMAT forum. It shows how we can utilise GMAT prep to its fulleset extent. I havent tried it, but looks like it'll work.

Here is the link https://gmatclub.com/forum/1-t28548

If outside links are not allowed, below is the text version.

==============================================

This post covers a few different tricks. Look for the bolded sections and see if any of it interests you

Ever wondered if you could re-use the GMATPrep exams and get new questions?


If you try to uninstall the GMATPrep software and then re-install, you will notice that the exams still appear "used". Frustrating? Is there a way around it?

Yes.

To re-use the GMATPrep exam software and reset the question sets:

1. Uninstall the GMATPrep software.
2. Navigate to C:\Program Files\GMATPrep
3. You will find a directory called exams
4. Rename this directory to old_exams (ideally copy it somewhere else too just in case)
5. Re-install the GMATPrep software.

The GMATPRep software will now think you've never taken the practice exams and you can now take two new exams.

I did this and never saw a repeat math question. I saw some repeat verbals, but mostly due to the fact that I've done almost all the OG verbal questions front to back, a lot of them are pulled from here.

How to review your old exams even after re-installing

Backup the existing copy of exams in C:\Program Files\GMATPrep to another directory.
Copy the files in old_exams back into the exams directory
Relaunch GMATPrep. It will now load your old exams and you can review those. So you can take the exam four, five, six, seven times ... and always have your old problems to go back to.

Want to know which questions you flaked back and forth on?


1. Open the c:\program files\gmatprep\exams directory.
2. Copy the exam logs. These are called practice test 1.log and practice test 2.log
3. Open the files in notepad.
4. Locate the section that reads:

2006-04-16 14.12.23.989:INFO :Item "QuantInstruction1" presented

Immediately after that, you will find:

2006-04-16 14.12.25.208:INFO :Navigate next requested

This is now your first Math question.

You will see something like:

2006-04-16 14.12.15.451:INFO :Item "187:009380" eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].
2006-04-16 14.12.55.438:INFO :Item "187:009380" presented
2006-04-16 14.13.23.515:INFO :Selecting response option D

This means you selected D.

You picked one answer and only one answer and hit submit.

If you see:

2006-04-16 14.34.99.324:INFO :Item "187:008920" presented
2006-04-16 14.35.28.230:INFO :Selecting response option A
2006-04-16 14.35.38.327:INFO :Selecting response option C
2006-04-16 14.37.54.208:INFO :Selecting response option A
2006-04-16 14.37.49.304:INFO :Selecting response option C

This means you went back and forth on options A and C.

Which question is this? Count the number of times you see "Item:" from the line "INFO :Item "QuantInstruction1" presented". The number of times you see it = the number of questions you answered. So in this case, if I saw Item: "....." 13 times before this section above, I know that question 14 had me going back and forth.

Same thing for verbal:

2006-04-16 15.29.45.218:INFO :Item "VerbalInstruction1" presented
2006-04-16 15.29.40.035:INFO :Navigate next requested
2006-04-16 15.29.40.156:INFO :Item "188:002908" eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].
2006-04-16 15.29.40.163:INFO :Item "188:002908" presented
2006-04-16 15.30.31.671:INFO :Selecting response option D
2006-04-16 15.30.23.634:INFO :Navigate next requested

Means I selected option D.
You are looking for the lines that say "presented" or lines that contain a set of choices. Lines that read:

2006-04-16 15.41.45.518:INFO :Item "188:000009-04" eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].
2006-04-16 15.41.45.528:INFO :Selection set "188:000009" eligibility from STRICT to NONE (responsible child: "188:000009-04" - [SELECTED]).
2006-04-16 15.41.55.538:INFO :Item "188:000009-01" eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].
2006-04-16 15.41.75.528:INFO :Item "188:000009-07" eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].
2006-04-16 15.41.15.518:INFO :Item "188:000009-05" eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].

Mean that you were presented question 188:000009 and options 01,04,07,05 were random answer choice selections. This counts as one question.

When you see something like this:

2006-04-16 15.58.26.311:INFO :Item "188:000553-01" presented
2006-04-16 16.01.32.121:INFO :Selecting response option A
2006-04-16 16.01.43.833:INFO :Selecting response option C
2006-04-16 16.01.31.254:INFO :Selecting response option E
2006-04-16 16.02.61.735:INFO :Selecting response option A
2006-04-16 16.02.14.641:INFO :Selecting response option B
2006-04-16 16.02.21.859:INFO :Selecting response option D

You know you really had a hard time picking!

How to match your incorrect questions with questions that you flaked on - a quick way to review


There is any easy way to do this. REVIEW ALL THE QUESTIONS YOU GOT WRONG IN BOTH VERBAL AND MATH.
Then close the GMAtPrep software and open up the software log.

Find:
2006-04-16 16.30.14.383:INFO :Item "EXIT" presented
2006-04-16 16.30.34.156:INFO :Navigate next requested
2006-04-16 16.30.25.452:INFO :Review screen displayed.

You are now reviewing your exam.

2006-04-16 16.30.29.235:INFO :Review incorrect items requested
2006-04-16 16.30.11.344:INFO :Item "187:003387" presented

This means that I got item 187:003387 wrong.

So now just go to the top of the file and search for 187:003387

2006-04-16 14.13.12.124:INFO :Item "187:003387" eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].
2006-04-16 14.13.33.367:INFO :Item "187:003387" presented
2006-04-16 14.15.45.116:INFO :Selecting response option B

This means I did not flake on this question. I selected only option B and hit next. I was wrong though.

What does eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED]. mean?

Good question.

I've seen both eligibility from STRICT to NONE - [SELECTED].
and eligibility from STRICT to LENIENT - [ENEMY].

I do not know what they mean, but labelling a question as "enemy" seems really appropriate don't you think? Last curious tidbit. The current version of GMATPrep had its exam questions defined on 12/06/05. I think I may have found a way to get COMPLETELY different question sets going once they update the software, which I presume they will do at least once a year. If that happens, I think that within a year or two (no benefit to us unfortunately) it might be possible to have several full sets of exam questions from previous versions of GMATPrep.

Anyone here download the GMATPrep software prior to 12/06/2005?

Enjoy!!
Does any know the same for MAC. Where to find the log files in MAC?