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Book Q.s how well proxy of "actual" performance?

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Book Q.s how well proxy of "actual" performance?

by towerSpider » Mon Jan 19, 2015 12:49 pm
Hi

From GMAT officially released questions in book, lets say I do 34 out of 37 consecutively published questions correctly IN time. Does that mean I will perform similarly well on actual exam/CAT too? If yes, to what extent? If no...not at all?

Thanks.
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by Brent@GMATPrepNow » Mon Jan 19, 2015 12:57 pm
towerSpider wrote:Hi

From GMAT officially released questions in book, lets say I do 34 out of 37 consecutively published questions correctly IN time. Does that mean I will perform similarly well on actual exam/CAT too? If yes, to what extent? If no...not at all?

Thanks.
37 questions from the Official Guide is not representative of the actual test.
The GMAT is computer adaptive, so within a few questions, you will encounter questions that are just within (or beyond) your abilities. In other words, the computer adaptive nature ensures that everyone STRUGGLES to correctly answer each question.

To get a true picture of how you'd do on test day, you need to take an official practice test: https://www.mba.com/the-gmat/download-fr ... tware.aspx

Also note that the questions in the Official Guide are arranged in order of difficulty. So, 37 questions from the beginning of the book are MUCH EASIER than 37 questions from the end of the book.

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by akhilsuhag » Mon Jan 19, 2015 1:00 pm
1) Official guide quant questions are much easier than the real thing.
2) Your performance will be considerably different under timed test conditions.

Take a practice test to find out. I would suggest gmatprep (official test download from mba.com) but you can try others as well- although they do not offer the same level of accuracy.
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by [email protected] » Mon Jan 19, 2015 5:04 pm
Hi towerSpider,

The OG Books are great sources for practice problems that once appeared on the Official GMAT. The order of the questions in each of the content sections is "generally" arranged in ascending order of difficulty, although you'll come across questions in the middle and latter portions of each section that are rather "easy."

There are a variety of differences between working out of a book and taking a CAT (or the Official GMAT), so the score results are NOT comparable:
1) The book does not adapt.
2) The book likely does not offer questions in the same ratio that the Official GMAT will.
3) The "mechanics" of working out of a book are different from the "mechanics" of working on a computer.
4) On Test Day, you have to go through an orientation program, an Essay, an IR section and a break before you even START the Quant section, so your energy levels will likely be different.

Taking a FULL-LENGTH practice CAT is really the only way to 'mirror' what you'll experience on Test Day. As such, you have to do everything within your power to make those experiences "test-like" and realistic. You'll spend the bulk of your time learning, doing practice problems, quizzes, review, etc.; plan to take a FULL CAT every 1-2 weeks.

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by ceilidh.erickson » Thu Jan 22, 2015 11:56 am
The problems in the OGs are meant to be a representative sampling of the questions on the real test. It will include easy, medium, and difficult questions. If you are aiming to score (or if you are actually scoring) in the 700 range, then the questions that you see on the real test will be considerably harder on average than the OG questions on average. For someone scoring in the 400 range, the opposite would be true.

You should also keep in mind that the questions are ordered roughly according to difficulty (with some randomization built in, as there would be on the real test with experimental questions). So questions 1-37 will be easier on average than 101-137.
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by Matt@VeritasPrep » Sun Jan 25, 2015 3:44 pm
Unfortunately not, though you never know. A few of the issues:

(1) The book doesn't adapt, so the questions don't get much harder or much easier based on your performance.

(2) The book doesn't update, so the questions it contains are often a decade out of date. The real test shifts it emphasis from time to time, while the OG is seldom meaningfully updated.

(3) The book has a reasonably normal distribution of questions from minimum to maximum difficulty, with few questions at either extreme and plenty in the middle. If you're at the higher end of the curve, you'll do well in the OG but you won't see ANY questions at that level on the actual exam. For instance, when I was studying for the test years ago, I bought the three OGs and did all the problems. I think I missed one RC, two CR, and zero SC problems in all from the set of official verbal questions (main book + supplement), so I figured I'd ace the verbal section ... but my verbal score on test day was only a 48, and the questions I saw were frustratingly arbitrary, not crystal clear like the ones I'd seen in the books.
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