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Actual GMAT Quant tougher than Kaplan??

by calvin21 » Tue May 03, 2011 9:50 pm
Hi,

I've be preparing solely using the Kaplan prep book for the GMAT. Then I recently took a CBT downloaded from mba.com, the official GMAT site. I was quite surprised by the level of Quantitative questions - I find them significantly tougher than anything I've seen in Kaplan material.

The odd part is even after doing poorly (say after getting a third of quant answers wrong), I was given a score of 690.

I have my GMAT in a week and I'm confused about whats going on here, would appreciate any insight..

Thanks!
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by KapTeacherEli » Thu May 05, 2011 10:06 pm
Calvin,

Remember that the adaptive nature of the test means that % of questions wrong isn't an accurate measure of performance. If you scored higher with more questions wrong, it probably means a stronger performance at the beginning raised your score and you spent the rest of the test at a plateau.

Hope this helps!
Eli Meyer
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by calvin21 » Thu May 26, 2011 8:27 pm
I took the GMAT a few weeks ago. The quantitative section was similar to the practice tests in the Kaplan material. If you happen to take the freely downloadable tests from mba.com, don't freak out if you find them to be unusually difficult - they are simply not representative of the real GMAT by any standard. On another note, I feel that preparing solely with Kaplan material isn't sufficient either. Its useful to go over at least the formulae in the official guide. Certain question types and formulae like standard deviation, compound interest and some coordinate geometry concepts are missing in Kaplan material..
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by KapTeacherEli » Fri May 27, 2011 10:23 pm
Hi Calvin,

All three of those things ARE present in Kaplan material--remember, because our practice tests are adaptive, you might not have seen them based on the specific questions you were assigned! Still, I'm glad that our material was helpful, and I hope you made all your score goals.
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by Stuart@KaplanGMAT » Sat May 28, 2011 11:57 pm
calvin21 wrote:I took the GMAT a few weeks ago. The quantitative section was similar to the practice tests in the Kaplan material. If you happen to take the freely downloadable tests from mba.com, don't freak out if you find them to be unusually difficult - they are simply not representative of the real GMAT by any standard. On another note, I feel that preparing solely with Kaplan material isn't sufficient either. Its useful to go over at least the formulae in the official guide. Certain question types and formulae like standard deviation, compound interest and some coordinate geometry concepts are missing in Kaplan material..
Hi Calvin!

Did you actually see a question on the GMAT that required you to use the standard deviation formula? I've never heard of that happening before, so I'd be very surprised if that were the case! As Eli said, we do cover standard deviation (and those other topics that you mentioned) in our course, but only in a more general sense (i.e. what standard deviation means and how to answer GMAT standard deviation questions).

Did you take a Kaplan course or study from our retail materials (i.e. one of the books you can buy at a bookstore)? Due to space limitations our retail books may only cursorily cover some of the lesser-tested concepts; our course, of course, covers even the least-often tested material.
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by calvin21 » Sun May 29, 2011 9:40 am
Hi Stuart,

I studied the Kaplan book, 2011 edition. Actually I did see a standard deviation question on the GMAT. The other concept I don't remember seeing in Kaplan material is "range". On one occasion, I had to use the formula to solve a quadratic equation (-b +/- sqrt(..)), which I dont think is in the guide.

Overall, I think I would have been just fine reading only the Kaplan material for 98% of the questions, but reading the GMAT Official Quant guide a few days before the exam surprised me with concepts that weren't in Kaplan material.

By the way I did very well, with the Kaplan book as my primary read..

Thanks,
Kailash.
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by Stuart@KaplanGMAT » Sun May 29, 2011 10:45 am
Hi Kailash,

glad to hear that things went well; that, of course, is the most important thing.

Standard deviation is definitely testable by the GMAT (as are other measurements of sets, such as median, mode and range); what I've never heard of, however, is a question that actually required you to calculate standard deviation (or even to know the SD formula). Many measurement of set questions show up in data sufficiency, really just testing whether you understand the basics of the concepts and not requiring detailed calculations.

We don't even teach the quadratic formula in our course (although we include it in our study materials), simply because there are always alternative (and usually quicker) ways to solve GMAT quadratic questions. FOIL, reverse FOIL and knowing how to backsolve are usually sufficient.

Congrats again!
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