Please, please, please don't try to read in to the difficulty of questions on the GMAT! A brief anecdote that you'll hopefully be able to learn from:
We had a student who took our class about six months ago call our office crying and just-about-hyperventilating from the test center after her exam, devastated after scoring a 570 or so (high 500s) on her GMAT after having approached 700 on practice tests. I ended up on the phone with her, and she kept asking me (between tears) "what can I do? I've tried everything." So I asked her about her experience, and she reported the following:
-She thought things were going okay on the quant, but toward the second half of that section she started getting "easy questions"
-She was pretty sure she was getting those right, but fairly consistently would see at least one out of every 2-3 questions that she felt was "too easy"
-Upon finishing the section with a series of 3-4 "easy" questions, she assumed she was doing poorly, and retreated to the restroom to recollect herself for the verbal, but eventually started crying and just couldn't stop herself
-On the verbal section, she couldn't read the first question or two through her tears, and decided to guess rather than waste time; knowing she had guessed, probably incorrectly, only fueled her despair, and she had trouble concentrating on subsequent questions
-By her estimate, she may have only "actually tried" on 10-15 of the verbal questions; she didn't really give herself a chance to read the RC passages or some of the CR problems, and probably guessed even on half the SC
-Because she guessed and gave up so many times, she finished the verbal something like 40 minutes early
So, having heard about what sounded like an absolutely horrendous performance on the verbal section, I wondered a bit about how she could have still ended up in the high 500s, significantly above average overall. When I asked for her breakdown, it came back:
95th percentile quant; 10th percentile verbal (or something to that extent...really close to those numbers)
Essentially, she quit on the verbal because she suspected that she had bombed the quant; in actuality, she dominated the quant section like few ever will, but allowed herself to be psyched out. The lesson? Just answer the questions, because there's no advantage to knowing how you're doing (and no way to tell), and there are significant disadvantages to having any doubt.
That's easier said than done, but also keep in mind that:
1) Questions are only considered "difficult" if a high percentage of test-takers miss them. Just looking difficult or complicated doesn't factor in, and there are some very innocent-looking questions that are devilishly clever and difficult.
2) Each section will contain at least a few unscored, experimental questions (the method by which GMAC establishes its difficulty rating for new questions), so if a question seems "too easy", there's a chance that it ended up in your queue by chance to determine its difficulty, and that it's not even part of your scoring algorithm.
So, to reiterate, please, please don't try to estimate how you're doing based on how difficult the questions seem to you!
Brian Galvin
GMAT Instructor
Chief Academic Officer
Veritas Prep
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