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MGMAT v. GMAT Quant

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MGMAT v. GMAT Quant

by GHong14 » Thu Feb 03, 2011 12:06 pm
I wanted to take a moment to start a discussion group on the impression of the GMAT and the MGMAT Quant. questions
from past GMAT takers.

First off, let me say that the MGMAT questions are some of the hardest and best quant prep questions I have seen. However, I notice that they are sometimes hard not necessarily due to the caliber of the question but a combination of verbosity, multiple calculations, and bait and switch tactics.

When I took the real GMAT, I noticed the questions were definitely within the same caliber. After answering 3 to 4 easy to medium level quant questions I was blasted again and again with problems that were way out of my league. I noticed the questions themselves were short and concise (no verbosity, no fancy wording) but the calculation and the proofs were tantamounting. The hardest part is realizing that you don't really know how to categorize a question like this. Is it a number property question? If so what is it really testing? Even or odds? Pos. or Neg? These are skills that I honed throughout my study of the GMAT.

So what have your previous experiences been with the GMAT quant sections? Are the questions similar? Are they harder? If so, how?
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by Adam@Knewton » Thu Feb 03, 2011 1:29 pm
I agree that the way the actual GMAT makes questions "hard" is different from the way that test-prep companies, including MGMAT and frankly everyone else, make questions "hard." Whereas test-prep companies take known questions/topics and design more complex and confusing questions around them, the GMAT feels free to make up totally weird content for each new batch of questions, especially Number Properties questions.

For example, most of us here have seen the questions that rely upon knowing that n! + k (where k<n) will be a multiple of k (e.g., 7! + 4 is a multiple of 4). This is a pretty interesting and provable fact, but 5 years ago there weren't any released questions that mentioned it, and so you'd never see it mentioned in any test-prep course. Now, of course, I wouldn't even expect to see it on the test anymore, but rather some new random weird thing that I hadn't studied before.

From the test-prep companies' perspective, the reason for this is that we would be treading on dangerous ground if we tried to write our own weird questions on content the GMAT may never test. We have to stick to what's been officially released so that we can promise you that we are, in fact, preparing you for the GMAT, not some bizarre abstract math test. As a result, we create harder questions by adding to them layers of complexity and misdirection, but we'll never invent our own nonsense -- and you should be happy for that because it means everything you see from a legit test-prep company is a topic you KNOW will really be on the test.

What does this mean to a test-taker? It means you can't treat practice material as a source for concepts to memorize. The skill that the GMAT tests is your ability to see a weird problem and quickly deduce some way of dealing with it. When practicing, even if you DO recognize the Number Property being tested, pretend you don't: practice testing cases, plugging in example numbers, and figuring out an answer without necessarily knowing the theory behind it. The more you practice this skill, that is, figuring out an answer to a question that seems totally random and weird, the better prepared you'll be for the hardest questions on Test Day -- questions that none of us, myself included, will have seen in advance.
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