Beat The GMAT a GMAT & MBA community

GMAC has released the 13th Edition of Official Guide for GMAT Review. The following are the key changes in the Quantitative section of the book.

There are 81 new questions(20%) out of a total of 404 quantitative questions.

The Diagnostic test remains identical to that in the GMAT 12th and 11th Edition.

There are 45 new questions out of the 230 Problem Solving questions.

There are 36 new questions out of the 174 Data Sufficiency questions.

The overlap with GMATFocus has been significantly reduced from 37 in the Official Guide 12th Edition to only 8 questions in the Official Guide 13th Edition. In my personal opinion, there should not be any overlap because it biases the score that students obtain when they take GMATFocus diagnostic tests.

The following is the list of new questions in the Official Guide GMAT 13th Edition:
Problem Solving: 12, 13, 14, 15, 37, 49, 56, 57, 60, 61, 69, 71, 75, 77, 78, 79, 80, 81, 91, 92, 108, 110, 112, 113, 114, 117, 118, 119, 127, 128, 129, 137, 158, 163, 166, 170, 177, 178, 182, 183, 196, 198, 199, 218, 229.
Data Sufficiency: 11, 15, 18, 20, 23, 24, 25, 29, 32, 33, 34, 37, 39, 41, 42, 52, 57, 65, 70, 74, 75, 79, 80, 83, 85, 92, 96, 97, 99, 102, 109, 123, 131, 133, 141.

The difficulty level of the questions in the Official Guide are generally in increasing order, with the hardest questions towards the end. However, this wasn't strictly the case in the 12th edition. Many of the questions have been repositioned to reflect their accurate difficulty level. For example, Problem Solving question#203 in the 12th edition has been repositioned to question#20 in the 13th edition. However, this hasn't been implemented thoroughly, for example, Data Sufficiency question#129, 132, and 135, are far harder than the questions present towards the end of the data sufficiency questions. All three of the above questions are written by Pearson Vue, the current test writers of the GMAT, and are more in line with the difficulty level of the current administration of the GMAT.

In summary, the Official Guide to GMAT Review 13th Edition, is an incremental change relative to the 12th Edition. Other than the Integrated Reasoning(I will analyze this later), the changes in the Quantitative section are slight, and I would recommend students to only buy the book if they don't already own the 12th edition or are taking the test after the introduction of the new Integrated Reasoning section in early June.

Finally, I will be shortly posting the video explanations to all of the quantitative questions in the Official Guide for GMAT Review 13th Edition.

Cheers,
Dabral

_________________
Free Video Explanations: OFFICIAL GUIDE GMAT 13, 12, 11, 10; QUANT REVIEW 2nd, 1st.