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OG13 difficulty curve - suddenly worried

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OG13 difficulty curve - suddenly worried

by topperdoggle » Wed May 15, 2013 1:24 pm
I'm up to Q137. Up until Q120, I was doing what I would consider okay - average 6-7/10 correct, and learning. But suddenly the difficulty seems to have spiked. I only got 6 right between 120-136!

Is this normal or did I just have a bad day? And based on what I said above, do I have any chance of getting a mark of 47 any time soon? I try to learn from my mistakes, I have another three weeks, and I'll be going over every question I got wrong and trying it again until I get it right.
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by Brent@GMATPrepNow » Wed May 15, 2013 4:38 pm
The questions in the Official Guide are arranged in order of difficulty, so your success rate is likely to decline as you progress through the book.

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by ceilidh.erickson » Fri May 17, 2013 8:43 am
Brent is right... although I would say that the questions are ordered roughly according to difficulty, not absolutely. There's no way that "Marsha's bucket" DS #174 is the hardest DS question out there! GMAC also changed the order of certain questions from OG12 to OG13, so those difficulty rankings can't be absolute.

That said, you should expect it to get harder as you move along. Don't focus so much on the number of questions right and wrong. Adaptive testing means that everyone will miss certain questions! Focus on WHY you're missing what you're missing. Do you know all of your rules and formulas? Are you making careless errors?

You should definitely be tracking your work to figure out which kinds of questions need more work. Here's some more information about tracking: https://www.manhattangmat.com/blog/index ... -studying/
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by Matt@VeritasPrep » Sun May 19, 2013 2:53 pm
topperdoggle wrote:I'm up to Q137. Up until Q120, I was doing what I would consider okay - average 6-7/10 correct, and learning. But suddenly the difficulty seems to have spiked. I only got 6 right between 120-136!

Is this normal or did I just have a bad day? And based on what I said above, do I have any chance of getting a mark of 47 any time soon? I try to learn from my mistakes, I have another three weeks, and I'll be going over every question I got wrong and trying it again until I get it right.
The questions get (more or less) harder as you progress, so this is normal. A Q47 is still very possible: I've seen a lot of students score ~Q47 on the official test (well, the GMATPrep simulator, but that's our best, most transparent approximation) with 50% of the math questions wrong, and many of those questions were comparable in difficulty to the ones you've mentioned.

Given the adaptive nature of the test, I'd spend a lot of your energy on questions around this range, as you're likely to see a bunch of them on the real exam. Be sure to really dwell on the ones you miss and try to understand what went wrong - there's an excellent chance that you'll confront remarkably similar problems on test day.
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