GMAT Math

You can find out what it's supposed to be testing if you check the category labeling in the explanation. (Of course, the way they label can be a little... abstract.)

Are you trying to find the categories so that you can study by category? Or are you trying to find out what is most commonly tested vs. not so common?

My company's strategy guides label all the problems by chapter and sub-chapter... but you have to buy the books to get the categorizations. So that's only helpful if you actually want to buy the books.

If you're just trying to figure out what's more vs. less commonly tested, though, ask here - we'd all be happy to chime in!

Got it. I don't know whether anyone has created such a list for free, but I'd actually suggest an exercise for you to do yourself. On the real test, we aren't told "rates problem coming up next!" right? So part of our task is to recognize what kind of problem this one is. For the areas with which you're struggling, part of your problem might literally be recognizing what type of problem this is.

So, how do you recognize a rate problem? (Or ratios? Or probability? etc?) If you know how, then it's an easy task to scan through OG and mark down for yourself which problems fall into which categories. And if you don't know how to recognize a particular type... well, you need to know, so this exercise will both let you know that you DON'T know yet and make you do the work to learn how to recognize problems of that type. Win-win.

Don't do them ALL by category though - save some that you can assign to random sets of questions so that you can put together sets that mimic the test. 20 questions, don't know what's coming next, have to figure it out within the first 10-15 seconds so that I can get the problem done in 2 minutes. That sort of thing.

Re: frequency. Number properties are very common in general (people tend to struggle most with divisibility and prime topics in this category - and exponents and roots are also common). Algebra is common, in particular basic algebra, algebraic translations (word problems), and quadratics at the higher levels. Geometry isn't as common as algebra overall; they seem to like triangles and circles the best. They also seem to like testing percents and fractions more than decimals. And for the general word problems, rates, work, ratios, and averages all tend to be fairly common. Probability, combinatorics, overlapping sets - those tend not to be very common.

All IMHO of course. Would love to hear what other teachers think.