A week ago I made a thread wondering if power score LSAT books can replace powerscore GMAT Critical Reasoning and Reading Comp. I found that a few of us on the forum would like to take both tests in near future while buying powerscore material for LSAT and GMAT separately is heavy on the pocket. While no one on this forum seemed to know the difference between the two guides, I wrote an email to powerscore directly, and simply asked what is the difference between their LSAT and GMAT CR series. Here is the reply:
The majority of Critical Reasoning passages contained in the GMAT Critical Reasoning Bible are licensed from Law Services, the makers of the LSAT. In making this decision, we weighed several important considerations, and obviously chose the questions with great care. Because of the limited number of real GMAT questions available, for the book we could use some LSAT questions, or we could make fake questions of our own. Because we believe that for CR carefully selected LSAT questions are much more accurate models for the GMAT Verbal section than fake, simulated questions that have never appeared on a real standardized test, we choose to use questions that have already been taken by thousands of people in a live testing situation. This is one main reason you see us (and several other GMAT preparation companies) using LSAT questions in GMAT preparation. Also, note that regardless of the source of the questions, the techniques discussed in the book are based on an analysis of actual GMAT questions from the past 20 years, and the techniques are completely valid and applicable to the GMAT. Second, we carefully select the questions we use so that they match GMAT concepts and question creation protocols. Simply put, we don't just use random LSAT questions. For example, although there are many LSAT questions featuring conditional reasoning, we do not use these problems in our GMAT course because the GMAT does not test conditional reasoning. Fortunately, since both tests are developed using standard testing models, the questions in the two tests are actually amazingly similar.
So if you were wondering, as I have, here is the answer.
The majority of Critical Reasoning passages contained in the GMAT Critical Reasoning Bible are licensed from Law Services, the makers of the LSAT. In making this decision, we weighed several important considerations, and obviously chose the questions with great care. Because of the limited number of real GMAT questions available, for the book we could use some LSAT questions, or we could make fake questions of our own. Because we believe that for CR carefully selected LSAT questions are much more accurate models for the GMAT Verbal section than fake, simulated questions that have never appeared on a real standardized test, we choose to use questions that have already been taken by thousands of people in a live testing situation. This is one main reason you see us (and several other GMAT preparation companies) using LSAT questions in GMAT preparation. Also, note that regardless of the source of the questions, the techniques discussed in the book are based on an analysis of actual GMAT questions from the past 20 years, and the techniques are completely valid and applicable to the GMAT. Second, we carefully select the questions we use so that they match GMAT concepts and question creation protocols. Simply put, we don't just use random LSAT questions. For example, although there are many LSAT questions featuring conditional reasoning, we do not use these problems in our GMAT course because the GMAT does not test conditional reasoning. Fortunately, since both tests are developed using standard testing models, the questions in the two tests are actually amazingly similar.
So if you were wondering, as I have, here is the answer.
