The Q and V sections of the test have not changed much, though it might be helpful to note the following:
"¢Â There is a much bigger supply of official questions for practice. You can now buy two additional GMATPrep tests (in addition to the two free ones), and there's a large Question Pack you can buy that works within the GMATPrep software.
"¢Â GMAC announced a few years ago an evolution in what SC questions emphasize. They have been trying to shift the emphasis from idiom and grammar to logic and meaning. Lawrence Rudner (VP of research and development for GMAC), clarified this change: "In recent years, GMAT item writers have been concentrating on the reasoning aspects rather than the purely grammatical aspects of Sentence Correction" ("item" is the trade lingo for "GMAT question")
Idioms, Sentence Correction and the GMAT Exam . This is not an enormous change - SC has always largely been about logic, and it remains true that grammar is important, since a sentence requires good grammar to convey its meaning correctly and unambiguously. But it will be less helpful now than before to memorize lists of idioms, and it is more important than before to truly understand what a sentence in SC is trying to say.
"¢ I have the impression, from my own experience and from test-taker debriefs, that the Verbal section is harder than it used to be, at least when you get into the high-level questions - the RC passages are denser, the CR logic more subtle. That shouldn't affect anyone's score much - if they make questions harder, you can afford to get more questions wrong - but it's something to be psychologically prepared for. The Quant section changed in a similar way several years ago. By including a larger number of very hard questions, they can more accurately assess very high-level test takers. This is, however, just an impression, and I might be wrong. It's a very difficult thing to judge, because on one GMAT, you see such a small sample of questions, and it's not easy to compare a test you take today with another you took several years ago.
