GMAT Strategy

lunarpower wrote:

786 wrote:I think the best preparation after your initial rounds of preparation is the CAT exams .
Can the experts recommend Which CATS should I buy for the fulllength tests practice ?

Regards,
Ambar Patil.

i received a pm.
my first recommendations are GMAT PREP and MGMAT tests; i don't have enough experience with most other brands of tests to give a meaningful opinion on them. also, i believe that this forum has rules against opining about other companies' products.

my suggestion would be this: you should re-take GMAT PREP a couple of times after the initial 2 attempts; there are so many questions in the software that you'll get *almost* all new questions.
you won't get all new ones -- you'll get at least a few repeated ones -- so the score you get on these repeats will be meaningless. however, the score is the least important feature of a practice test, so you should still take the repeated attempts; they will still be quite valuable in terms of (a) reviewing the problems for new/problematic concepts and (b) practicing your timing.

we've removed the problems in which "compare to" vs. "compare with" is an issue. those expressions are still found in some of the problems, but they are not the basis for elimination.

lunarpower wrote:hi -- thanks for your feedback. here are some responses:

maihuna wrote:Hi Ron,
Thanks for thr insight. but i m not happy with mgmat tests. Once upon a time it used to be nexct to gmatprep but now

this comment is somewhat ironic, in that GMATPrep has not been updated since its release in 2006-7 (other than software updates, bug fixes, and the like). so, i'd like to know a little more about what you mean here.

the only new software that GMAC has released in that interval is the GMATFocus (non-adaptive math prep software), which contains a very small fraction of the number of problems that are in GMATPrep.

Excuse me for the harsh words but I am horrified to see that MGMAT question bank remains the same in last 5 year or so.

the question banks are mostly the same, yes. one of our forthcoming projects is to update those, but at the moment we have several higher priorities. first, updating the actual CAT exams is always a higher priority (and a much, much bigger project -- the CAT pool contains over two thousand questions, compared to 200 in the question banks); second, we are already starting to develop a preliminary curriculum for the GMAT's upcoming changes next week.

The last time I Wrote MGMAT was in 2008 I just wrote those tests again and found the same story. It is impossible to see even a single new questions.

i understand where you're coming from. however, we try to focus the majority of our attention on the CAT exams themselves -- as those give actual scores and are taken by a much larger cross-section of students.

from a business standpoint, another significant reason why we've placed a relatively low priority on updating the question banks is that the vast majority of our customers are not "repeat customers" -- i.e., they take our course / use our materials; they take the test; then they're done with that phase of their lives forever.
if we were a company whose customer base consisted more of long-term customers who came back to us for years and years and years, then creating a continuous stock of brand-new questions would be a higher priority. however, fewer than 1% of our customers are on the site for longer than a year, so from our point of view it's a better business decision to keep questions for a longer time so that we can collect copious data on them. we understand that this situation may be unfortunate for the aforementioned 1% of our clients; however, (a) the constant introduction of brand-new questions would decrease the reliability of the tests, because there would be less data available for those questions, and (b) that 1% is compensated by the fact that the charge for re-taking our course is substantially lower (about 80% lower, for the nine-session course) than the original course fee.

My honest feedback : MGMAT has not lived up to the expectation of changing times.

to tell the truth, there have been very few substantive changes in the focus or curriculum of the GMAT since it changed hands from ETS to Pearson Vue some years ago.
we've been tracking those changes and implementing them into our software, but, in terms of your statement that it's not night-and-day different, you're absolutely correct -- because the same is true of the official test.

as another data point, look at the OG books. the 12th edition -- the most recent -- still contains about 75-80% of the same problems from the 11th edition (not similar problems -- exactly the same problems). in fact, almost all of the problems from the 10th still live on in the currently-in-print OG supplements!
the fact that GMAC itself hasn't seen fit to update the question pool much -- combined with the above observation that GMATPrep hasn't actually changed at all since 2006-7 -- is a strong testament to the constancy of the test overall.

also, we most definitely do track the changes in the test. those changes occur mostly at the margins (because most of the material has stayed the same), so you probably haven't noticed the changes -- but they are there.
as one conspicuous example, we've eliminated "tone" questions entirely from our RC's, since those questions have disappeared from the 11th to the 12th OG and don't figure into any other current-edition materials.

we've made many other significant changes, but i'll keep it short, mostly because it doesn't seem fitting to reply in considerable detail to a post written in such an unnecessarilly belligerent/unprofessional tone ("you people", etc.).

Your Quant questions are not representative of actual gmat, questions are hard much harder than actual gmat and scoring very lenient.

we have noted the presence of a certain number of questions that contain excess work -- i.e., questions on which the necessary work will probably take more than 2 minutes -- and are taking steps to fix/replace those problems.
however, i don't think that there is much support for your claim about the difficulty of the questions, as most of them are checked carefully against official items. we also monitor the rates at which our own students get the questions correct, and we'll toss out questions that are so hard that the correct response rate is around 20% (= random guess rate). ´
if you have any specific questions you'd like to point out as excessively difficult, we'd like to see which ones -- you can PM them to me.

as far as scoring, it's inevitable that some scores will be discrepant -- both our test and the official test have significant standard deviations, so, 10% of the time, the two could even be off by as much as 70+ points!
however, this is just normal statistical variation ("normal" as in normal/bell curve) -- the same would happen if you took two actual administrations of the GMAT exam.
within these parameters, we've checked the scores of thousands of our students against their official scores, and, within acceptable statistical variation, the scores have matched. therefore, our overall data indicate that the reliability of our tests is satisfactory.

While your verbal is below par. I am not sure when even OG has gone from OG 10/11/12 you guys are still at 2007/8.

this comment is misleading in two ways -- (1) "going from OG 10/11/12" has kept a substantial majority of the same questions (see above), and (2) the most recent OG was released in march 2009, not long after the 2007-8 period that you've cited here.

I mean you people are not employing the new learning of gmat trends in your testing material.

for a statement like this to be helpful, please include some specific gmat trends that you feel we've left out.

Otherwise still your quants shoudn't have been filled with so many P&C and probabilities.

actually, while it's still a minor area, the new gmat focus tests -- as well as anecdotal evidence from recent test administrations -- suggest that this area has actually been increasing in importance.

And your verbal with so many SC's still testing all varieties of pronouns

which varieties of pronouns?

we've already adjusted the test according to two things we've noticed in the most recent books/software: (1) we've taken out all of the "possessive poison" questions, and (2) we've minimized the importance of pronoun ambiguity.

instead vs rather than and compare with vs compare to's

we've removed the problems in which "compare to" vs. "compare with" is an issue. those expressions are still found in some of the problems, but they are not the basis for elimination.

and those unreasonable CR's behind the logic all over the park explanation.

every CR on our tests has at least a distant analogue in the official materials. obviously we haven't copied the same logic and inserted new topics, but, if our CR's are "all over the park", then some of the official problems must be "all over the park" as well.

also, i'm not sure what the comfortably vague expression "all over the park" means. however, if it means "outside the scope of the argument", note that there are several major CR problem types that actually require correct answers that are outside the original scope of the argument.

I am impressed with Kaplan. Their quant is still Gmatlike but truly not 700+ kind of and verbal is great. I am so happy seeeing these guys changing their question banks. I was kind of sweating after giving their exam. Just verbal makes you so tired that you almost feel like you have witten an actual test. I was about to fix my exam but after writing their exam I postponed it. Though their scoring is still funny 55 in quant for example. And a Q55 V47 to an aggregate of 760. Phew, in scoring kaplan will be either too low or too high's.

i'm glad you're happy with kaplan; it's generally against forum rules for us to opine (either positively or negatively) about other companies. also, if you are scoring 760's on your practice tests, then perhaps you've learned things from our materials after all. (:

lunarpower wrote:

786 wrote:I think the best preparation after your initial rounds of preparation is the CAT exams .
Can the experts recommend Which CATS should I buy for the fulllength tests practice ?

Regards,
Ambar Patil.

i received a pm.
my first recommendations are GMAT PREP and MGMAT tests; i don't have enough experience with most other brands of tests to give a meaningful opinion on them. also, i believe that this forum has rules against opining about other companies' products.

my suggestion would be this: you should re-take GMAT PREP a couple of times after the initial 2 attempts; there are so many questions in the software that you'll get *almost* all new questions.
you won't get all new ones -- you'll get at least a few repeated ones -- so the score you get on these repeats will be meaningless. however, the score is the least important feature of a practice test, so you should still take the repeated attempts; they will still be quite valuable in terms of (a) reviewing the problems for new/problematic concepts and (b) practicing your timing.