GMAC announced at a conference last fall that they would be releasing the 12th edition of OG sometime toward the end of 2008. I wouldn't absolutely bet on that release date though - they released both OG11 and GMATFocus later than they said they would.

At the conference, the guy in charge of all of the research (the questions and the algorithm) did NOT say it would contain new types of questions. He said it would contain newly-retired questions that hadn't previously been released to the public. He also said they were explicitly trying to make sure that they didn't have American-centric (and, therefore, biased) questions in the pool, and they were stripping out problems that expected people to know things like the local currency, etc (either literally removing the questions or providing conversion information as part of the question - that sort of thing).

We have been noticing a gradual shift in terms of their preference for certain content areas and question sub-types. Eg, weighted averages have been more common; combinatorics have been less common. In CR, analyze the argument structure has been decreasing in frequency; explain a situation / discrepancy has been increasing. That sort of thing.

jiujitsubri - be thankful that you are blissfully ignorant of the scoretop fiasco. If you're curious, do a search on the site and read some of the threads - there's a lot of info.

codesnooker wrote:

jsl wrote: For example, being English, I saw a question which quoted dimes and nickels and I didn't know what value they were!

I didn't see any such question but I am sure that GMAC is not going give us any question which requires conversion of one parameter into another, without providing the conversion formula in the question.

Yes, that's exactly right, with one exception- you need to know how to convert units of time (60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, etc). In all other cases, the GMAT will provide conversion rules- it wouldn't be fair otherwise.

Right - they are providing those conversions now. They didn't always used to - but they recognized that this wasn't fair, so they started making sure all those questions do, in fact, provide the conversions, etc. At this point, I doubt there are any of the "old type" left in the database.

At the conference in the fall, their head of R&D said that they were in the process of combing through to make sure they'd gotten rid of everything - I assumed they got rid of that stuff in "live" questions first and were then making sure that the stuff wasn't still in OG (for the next edition), etc.