Mahattan GMAT Practice CATs

[chrisgiles01]

I have taken the actual GMAT and scored a 710 (48Q, 40V) and I am studing for a retake. I recently purchased the Manhattan SC guide to try and improve my SC performance. The book came with access to Manhattan's practice CATs. I took one of them today and I noticed that the 700-800 level quant questions were much harder than anything I saw on the actual test. It was difficult to even finish the test. Has anyone else observed this? Iwould love some feed back!

Chris

[parore26]

I definitely felt some of their questions were way too hard. Even though I finished with a 99% on the quant section. I'd love to hear the impressions of others, especially those who have taken the test.

[drhomler]

Chris,

They are significantly harder than anything I have observed anywhere else and different. If you want a real kick in the ...check out their "challenge problems". Mastery of their quant can help with the concepts, however that doesnt necessarily make them helpful to scoring higher on the official test. I think they do a great job, particularly with the number properties, combinatorics and word problems. I really struggled with number properties in the begininning but after working through their problems I felt I did very well on them in the real deal.

In the end I ended up scoring below where I wanted to in the quant even though I felt I had significantly improved in the topic area especially as presented by mgmat so I may have had a bad day, caught some raw nerves or who knows.

[Stacey Koprince]

Most high-level students report timing issues on the real test even when they didn't have them on practice tests. The biggest reason seems to be that people don't want to "let go" when they hit a question that's really too hard for them - instead, they spend too much time, get behind, and have to play catch up or guess at the end. (Even if they were able to "let go" on practice tests, during the real thing, they panic and revert to "school math mode" which tells us to try our best on every problem.) Net result: the score is not as high as it should be.

We want to make sure that our high level quant questions really push our students to deal with this issue BEFORE they get to the real test. What do you do when you hit something you can't do? How do you make sure you maintain your pacing throughout the section? What do you do if you get behind? You need to have answered those questions before you take the real thing, and our higher-level questions force you to deal with the issue so that you can make those adjustments successfully.

[Stacey Koprince]

Thanks - we really appreciate your feedback. We're constantly looking for ways to improve and can use all the help we can get!

I forgot to add one other thing that is tougher to get around and does affect your perception if you are a higher-level math person. The official test inserts experimental questions into the mix, so if you are high-level, you essentially get little "breaks" here and there, where you see easier questions. These questions aren't actually a part of your scoring algorithm though - they don't count at all. But you do get that mental break for a couple of minutes.

We didn't want to artificially adjust the scoring algorithm just to give people these breaks - because then it would actually alter the score you receive and not be as comparable to the GMAT. We're working on building an experimental question set-up into our tests so that we mimic the real thing even more, but that probably won't be live for quite some time. It's pretty complex.

[cgiles01]

Stacy, dr, parore, and "guest",

Thank you all so much for your time. One of my initial obsevations was the lack of "breaks" in the Manhattan test. Stacy, your piece on "letting go" was very helpfull and your participation in this forum is greatly appreciated.

Chris

[mjjking]

Well, I'm glad to hear that I'm not the only one who found Manhattan GMAT questions very HARD, especially in the math part! Even though I've just scored a 670 on a Manhattan GMAT CAT test, with 45Q and 36V scores, I feel I got lucky with 2-3 questions in the quantitative part thanks to "educated guessing". Nonetheless, I've found their questions different and harder than the Official Review questions... Yet, they say that the standard deviation could make my score fall between 600 and 700, but that there is a slight chance of being below 600 also... So what does it mean?? that score simply doesn't prove anything??
thanks!

[Stacey Koprince]

That standard deviation range I listed was specifically for a score of 650.

So, on the official test, the standard deviation is about 30 points. That means - again, on the official test - that if you get any particular score, you have a 2/3 chance of scoring within 30 points of that score if you take it again and a 1/3 chance of scoring outside of that range. So if you score, say, a 650, you have a 2/3 chance of scoring between a 620 and a 680 if you took it again the next day (which you can't do in actuality), and a 1/3 chance of scoring below a 620 or above a 680.

On our test, the standard deviation is about 50, not 30, so the range is a bit wider. It's not that much wider than the official test's SD though. (And, again, any non-official test is going to have an SD that is wider than the official test - it's not possible to be more accurate than the real thing.)