GMAT Strategy

Thanks very much for the kind words.

In general, it is best to study with the latest version of OG, however if it means disrupting your planned schedule for taking the GMAT--just use whatever recent version is around.

When I took the GMAT I studied with OG10 even when OG11 was published in the middle of my prep. The differences between the two books are minimal. If you are ready to study now, go with OG11 and don't stress if a new version comes out!

Good luck to you!

You're welcome and good luck! Also know, this community is here for you throughout your prep.

the one area in which i've noticed the biggest changes between editions - most notably between the 10th and 11th editions, but also between even earlier consecutive editions that i found in public libraries - is sentence correction. the evolution of problems in other areas of the test is minimal, but the sentence correction problems have undergone noticeable changes between the 10th and 11th editions.

specifically, i've noted that the sentence correction problems are showing a trend away from problems based on elusive, hand-waving concepts such as diction, word choice, concision, and precision, and toward concrete, mechanical concepts such as parallel structure. this is good news especially for non-native english speakers, who must often simply guess between alternatives based on idiom or word choice.

therefore, if you're doing a general study that includes sentence correction, or, especially, if sentence correction is a particular focus of your study, you should use only the 11th edition, and you may even want to consider picking up the new edition when you can get your hands on it. (at mgmat, we're excited to see the changes ourselves.) if your focus is almost exclusively on quant, then it's less important which edition you use, although it's still rational to show a preference for the later edition(s).

I'm curious if anyone has any information about the content of the 12th edition of the OG. With the changeover from ETS to ACT, I wonder whether there will be a substantially new (more recently retired) question set in the new edition of the book - if that's the case, the 12th edition should be much more representative of the current GMAT than the 11th.

Of course, there'd be a lot of value to having both editions if the new edition is quite different (and no great advantage if they're substantially the same), so I'd recommend that anyone beginning their study now purchase the 11th edition of the OG regardless.

Yes, the new edition has been available for a while. I think it's much improved, despite what some reviews may say. In particular the level of difficulty of the Quant is higher now, and the style of question seems much more relevant to the current test. There are, for example, a few high level number theory questions, something that was missing from OG11, and there are many new word problems, specifically on weighted averages and set counting (Venn diagram and related set problems), which are very popular topics these days. I haven't yet gone through the new Verbal questions in detail - we only recently got copies of the new book this side of the ocean - but I'd recommend attempting the DS section at least.