Anyone know the difficulty breakdown for the OG Quant. Rev?

[dubc1982]

I'm working in the OG Quant. Review book (skinny green one) and on the cover it says "New organization of questions in order of difficulty". Its obvious they get harder as you go along, but does anyone have an idea of where the medium difficulty questions start, and then where the most difficult start? There are 176 questions in the Problem Solving section and I did the 1st 40, which were way too easy. I'm skipping to question 100 and will work from here till the end. I'm trying to get an accurate idea of where I stand in Problem Solving.

[Stacey Koprince]

They haven't published any exact information as to difficulty level, unfortunately. I just quickly scanned through and I'd say the last 20-30 are in the 700+ range. The maybe 30 before those are in the 650-720 range. 600 range looks like it starts in the high-double-digit numbers (maybe 70 or 80).

These are, of course, just estimates - you can't really tell just by looking what the difficulty levels are. We run the data on our own questions (based on our students' results) and we're sometimes surprised by the difficulty level that comes back for a particular question.

Do remember one thing: you don't want to study just those problems that you can't do easily yet, or just those problems that are at the level that you want to score. You still have things to learn from problems that are right in your current scoring range. How can you do the same problems more efficiently? How can you build on those skills to get to the next level of problems of that same type? Etc.

[phumbert]

That is great insight Stacey, even if it is just an estimate. Thanks a ton!

[GMATkid76]

This is very good. I have taken the GMAT multiple times and studied the OG quite thoroughly.

Here is my best guess of the breakdown: the OG contains up to about the 90th percentile of questions. The GMAC leaves out about the top 10% of questions in order to differentiate (although companies like Manhattan GMAT do provide ways of accessing the type of questions in the top 10%). I worked on analyzing the GMAT questions with a friend who is a CS guy at Google and we calculated a little more difficult score breakdown than Stacy (i.e., the 600 level questions start a little later than Stacy estimated--but my guess is just an estimate too).

If you look at the GMAT Score Breakdown for quant, it is notable how curved the tail ends of the sub-section scores are--especially at the top.

I would say that if you examine Project GMAT, you'll get a sense for some of the tougher questions.