GMAT Strategy

Eric in his post says

same question patterns are tested over and over again. When I actually took the GMAT myself, it almost felt like I was cheating because I was able to recognize so many questions from my OG practice--with a number or word changed here or there.

click on this link

https://www.beatthegmat.com/how-to-study ... h-t98.html

now my question is how many of you have felt the same way while taking the test? how true it is? is it for quan or verbal? or both? please share your experiences

All I can say is Eric was lucky. But yes, a few question forms are seen to be repeating. I did not have more than a couple of repeats from OG.

Yea I doubt it'll be like that for all of us. Having said that though, they only revise the questions every few years or so, so I think its worth going through the stories of those who have taken the test in recent times. Not to cheat or anything, but to recognise certain patters (if they occur).

Great topic - you know, the test is pretty sophisticated so you probably won't be able to recognize a question on the actual exam and say "That's identical to #39 from the OG, so the answer is definitely D!". But you can certainly recognize the familiar traps and setups in questions and I think that's what Eric was talking about. You can get really comfortable noticing things like:

-The question said "nonnegative", which means that 0 is possible so that will probably come up.

-It's an inequality with a variable; they probably want me to assume that it's positive and just divide by it, but it could easily be negative.

-This conclusion has the word "only" (or "sometimes") in it - that's going to be the key word.

-They're asking about factors...I need to break this number down into primes.

If you're paying attention to those kinds of things, even a unique-looking question will have a handful of very-familiar components, and that's your insider's edge.

Does anyone else have any familiar question setups that you see over and over?