Difficulty Levels on the GMAT
This week, we have a great article from guest author Ron Purewal, a Manhattan GMAT Instructor and one of my fellow moderators here at Beat The GMAT. Ron has some really interesting stuff for us on the difficulty levels of GMAT questions. Take it away, Ron!
Studying for the GMAT is a formidable undertaking. There are so many potential topics of study and so much study time to be allocated that it is often difficult, and may even seem impossible, to decide where to start or where to focus.
Still, there are some topics that are definitely less important than others and, in the case of most students, simply not important at all. Probably the most prominent of these topics, in the minds of students, is difficulty level.
On the GMAT forums, I see many posts inquiring about the specific, numerical difficulty level of problems. While these numbers if they can be nailed down at all are an interesting curiosity, they are essentially irrelevant to students strategy; the only people who benefit from knowing specific difficulty levels are people who write the exams.
In other words: Do NOT worry excessively about the difficulty level of the problems.
You should NEVER bother trying to assign specific numbers to the difficulty of a problem; the only levels of difficulty that will ever affect you are hard for me, easy for me, and just right for me.
In fact, you should never give much thought to the difficulty level of the problems no matter whether you are taking the actual exam or just studying. Heres why.
When you study, an excessive focus on difficulty level will cause you to abandon the big picture, causing you to focus excessively on specifics. Thats not a good thing, because the only true purpose of studying is to discover general principles and techniques that will solve not only the problem at hand, but also OTHER problems similar problems that may appear on future exams. (These general principles and techniques are what I have called takeaways on the forum and in classes.)
Heres why difficulty level doesnt really matter when you study: its quite possible to derive a takeaway from any easy problem, and then use it to solve a much more difficult problem in the future or vice versa. Therefore, it is imperative that you study all problems within your grasp with the same intensity, without worrying about difficulty level; you never know which problems will give you the takeaways that you will need on your official test.
Then, theres the matter of taking the actual exam. In this circumstance, its also not worthwhile to worry about the difficulty level of problems because you will be completely unable to judge it with any accuracy. Therefore, if you even let your thoughts wander to difficulty level, not only will you be engaging in a completely unproductive thought process, but you will also be diverting mental energy away from the much more important task of answering the questions themselves!
Instead, your single most important mission during the official exam is to MONOTASK i.e., to think about nothing other than the objective content of the problem in front of you, and the techniques that will solve that problem. Outside concepts such as difficulty level should not even enter your mind while you take the official test; theyll do nothing but raise your stress level.
Is it ever appropriate to think about difficulty level?
About specific difficulty level trying to nail it down to the nearest hundred?
NO.
Never.
However, if you are studying from a source that is roughly ordered by difficulty such as the Official Guide quant section then it may be helpful to have a very general, very vague sense of the difficulty of the problems youre working on. In particular, if everything in a given section just seems too hard, then move back a bit; if everything seems a bit too easy, then move forward.
This is pretty much the only situation in which the notion of difficulty level will help you. And note that its still not helping you solve the problems its just helping you decide which problems to study in the first place. Thats not something that will transfer onto the official test.
Remember monotask!
So why does MGMAT tell us so much about the testing algorithm?
Mainly, we give you this information in order to justify our advice about time management and overall planning.
When we tell our students things such as NEVER spend too much time on one problem, inquisitive students will sometimes want to know why especially because this would be terrible advice on old-fashioned paper tests. This is the ONLY reason why we explain about adaptive algorithms and difficulty levels because its the machinery behind our advice.
In this respect, were not unlike a mechanic who might explain the workings of an anti-lock brake system to a curious customer. Is the customer ever really going to need to know how anti-lock brakes work? Of course not the customer just has to know how to use the anti-lock brakes, and in what ways they might differ from traditional brakes. The customer will never need any knowledge of the inner workings of the brake system (unless he/she plans to become a mechanic) but its the foundation of the functional knowledge that the customer does need.
Its the same with the adaptive algorithm and difficulty levels. Are you ever really going to need to know the nitty-gritty of how these work? Nope you just have to know how to manage your time and how to proceed through the questions, and in what ways this test might differ from traditional paper-based tests. You will never need any knowledge of precise difficulty levels, or of the precise workings of the adaptive algorithm (unless you plan to write tests yourself) but we present it to you, as full disclosure, because its the foundation of the functional knowledge that you will need.
Good luck!
Major take-aways from Rons article:
- When studying, its not productive to focus on the difficulty level of a problem. You can get just as much out of an easy for you problem as you can a hard for you problem. (In fact, I sometimes prove this to my students in class by showing them how much more they can learn from a problem that they all got right and that they all thought was really easy!)
- When taking the test, its detrimental to your performance to focus on the difficulty level of a problem. That brain power is brain power you could be using for the test; dont let yourself get distracted by something thats not useful. Besides, the actual test writers have to test these problems on thousands of students in order to determine the difficulty levels; were certainly not going to figure out the level just by looking at a problem for two minutes. :)