GMAT Strategy

There have been slow changes to SC over time and those changes have been addressed in our SC guides. (The 4th edition just came out a couple of months ago.)

There haven't been any major changes, though - when someone sees 15 questions on one official test and some of those seem "different" that doesn't necessarily mean there were any changes at all. That person might just have been thrown for some reason. Also, there are thousands of questions in the database, so what one person sees on one test is not necessarily representative of the broader trend. Just saying: I'd be careful about the "group-think" that we can develop based on very limited data points and reports of people taking the test. By its very nature, a standardized test cannot introduce major changes without messing up the stats going back over the past couple of years - and people within that time range are all applying together for schools - so the test-writers are pretty cautious about introducing changes gradually.

By the same token, when they introduce a new guide (OG12, say), we do see a different mix of questions, but there still aren't that many "big" changes to what we see. Something might feel more subtle / difficult, but that might just be because you hadn't seen an example of that type before or didn't recognize that it was similar to some other, older problem.

For example, I've spent the last few weeks indexing every single quant problem in the new OG12 and I found nothing - not a single problem - that I couldn't recognize or think "oh, I've seen something like that before." There were a few (<5) for which I thought the wording was kind of different / new, but nothing for which I thought - wow, that's really different. I haven't indexed the verbal side yet, but I'm not expecting any big surprises there either. It's all similar in the end.