GMAT Official Resources

In my years as a GMAT tutor I have had many students come to me complaining that although they have done a lot of prep for the test, their scores just are not increasing. There are many reasons that this could be the case, but in this post I would like to discuss what, in my experience, is by far the most common cause and also the easiest one to solve: a reliance on non-official resources!

This may seem over-simplistic, but I really can’t even begin to count the number of times that I have been contacted by someone who BELIEVES that they have not been improving when in fact they have. In fact, I just began tutoring someone who came to me by googling the exact title of this blog post (she was the motivation for this blog post). When I found out what she had been doing (essentially using third party resources without using the official questions and tests released by GMAC) I said what I say to all the people in this situation: “you don’t even know if you have been improving or not because you are not using official questions or taking official practice tests.” And so I had her do what I have all people in this situation do: take an official practice test.

What was the result? The apparent lack progress after months of studying and 6 “non-official” practice tests was revealed to be actual progress. She believed that she had gone from a 530 to a 540 (not a very impressive increase after all of the work that she had put in) when in fact she had improved to a 670!!! The truth is that it’s not even clear how much of that was actual “improvement” since her initial diagnostic was from the same prep company that all her subsequent tests were from (I don’t want to name the company but it is one of the major players). It’s quite possible that her initial GMAT diagnostic score might have been a 600 had she taken an official test!

I have written other posts about the need to use official GMAT resources, but I thought that it would be worthwhile to write one devoted specifically to how harmful it can be to rely on 3rd party resources, especially in trying to measure one’s own progress. Let me enumerate the reasons why it can be so detrimental to gauging one’s improvement…

The most obvious and most damaging issue is that 3rd party practice tests do not use the actual scoring algorithm used on the GMAT. Test prep companies certainly aim to approximate the algorithm but they do it with varying degrees of success ranging from ok to not even close! Seriously, not even close!!! So when you rely on these tests you really may have absolutely no idea where you are actually scoring. The tests may be telling you that you are at a 550 when you are really closer to 700 or even the other way around. The aforementioned girl who I just began tutoring received Verbal scores no higher than 34 on the non-official tests she was taking but got a 44 on her first official GMAT Prep test! 44! That is a ridiculous Verbal score (almost 99th percentile) whereas the 34 Verbal was just ok.

Furthermore, the questions themselves are not that accurate. When I do official GMAT practice tests, I usually get 1 Verbal question wrong on the whole section. On 3rd party practice tests, however, I may get 6 or 7 Verbal questions wrong. Why would that be the case? It is not that the questions are just harder – it’s that they are ambiguous or just not well-vetted, well-written questions and so the kind of reasoning than can and should be applied on real GMAT verbal questions often can’t be applied. So not only does one risk having an inaccurate representation of their score when using 3rd party practice tests, one also risks not learning how, exactly, to approach real GMAT questions.

So if your GMAT score SEEMS to not be increasing, the first thing that you need to do is get an accurate understanding of where your GMAT score actually is. It might be that your score IS quite a bit higher than you think (this is often the case for people who come to me complaining that their score is not increasing). Using 3rd party resources is not necessarily bad, but as you get deeper into your GMAT journey you must turn increasingly if not entirely to official resources and of course to get an accurate gauge of where your score really is you need to do an official GMAT Prep test.

If indeed you determine that your score really is not increasing then of course there are reasons why this might be the case. In my next post I will examine some of the other factors that can contribute to the lack of progress and will discuss what can can be done about it.

It never ceases to amaze me how few people use the official GMAT resources that are available. This is perhaps a credit to how good the major test prep companies have gotten at convincing people that their resources are an accurate representation of what is on the test. While third party resources can be very valuable for learning the content that appears on the GMAT or for learning how to more effectively approach questions, when it comes to doing practice questions or especially practice tests, there just is no substitute for using official GMAC-released practice questions and practice tests.

I have written about this in other blog posts, but I am not exaggerating when I say that probably 1 out of every 2 people who contact me for help with the GMAT has either never taken an official GMAT practice test or has not been using official GMAT questions to practice with (and these are people who HAVE been using other resources like those of ManhattanGMAT or Kaplan or one of the other test prep companies). I think what usually surprises me most in these encounters is that people don’t even seem to understand the difference! Often the reaction that I get is something to this effect: “You mean that ManhattanGMAT tests are not official tests?!”

Sometimes just getting people to start using official GMAC resources is enough to get them a significant score increase. In fact, sometimes just even having them take an official practice test is enough. Again a very common occurrence for me is a student who contacts me complaining that they have studied a lot but are still stuck at the 550 mark or 580 mark or something like that. When it becomes clear that all they have done is ManhattanGMAT tests I will often say, “well how do you know you are stuck at a 550 mark when you have never done an official test?” In many of these cases the person then goes and takes an official GMATPrep test and contacts me back to let me know that they scored in the mid-600’s or some score that was significantly higher than what they had been scoring on the ManhattanGMAT or Kaplan tests that they were taking.

Again I am not arguing that third party resources are useless. Even the practice tests can be useful when used for the correct purpose. But trying to give yourself an authentic test-taking experience or trying to gauge exactly what score you are at are not reasons to take a third party test!!! Test prep company materials are particularly good at teaching the content that serves as the foundation on the Quant and Verbal sections of the test and some resources are also good at providing insight into how to approach the questions more effectively. The official GMAC resources are not particularly good in those regards.

But once you have learned the core fundamentals and have begun to understand how to approach the questions you MUST, MUST move on to official questions and then official practice tests to ensure that you are practicing on the types of questions that will appear on the exam.

There are a couple of reasons this is so important. First of all, it is very difficult to write questions that really accurately reflect the questions on the actual exam and test prep companies typically do not have their absolute most experienced and knowledgeable people writing the questions. This is especially true for Verbal questions, which are so hard to write in a way that accurately reflects the logic of the questions on the actual test. If you write a sentence correction question that is too grammar focused and not logic and meaning focused enough then you have a question that really departs from the actual questions in a pretty significant way.

Another issue is the distribution of questions that you see. Often test prep companies focus too much on some question types and not enough on others. So you might be practicing on a lot of combinatorics and probability questions when these questions are not that well represented on the actual test (and even when they are, they are often very difficult questions that may be better to guess on anyway). This is especially true of 3rd party practice tests – if the distribution of different question types is not accurate to the test then the practice test is not a realistic representation of the test. What’s worse is that when you analyze your performance on the test you may walk away with the belief that you need to work on particular topics (like combinatorics and probability) when you are coming to that belief only because you saw an unrealistically disproportionate number of those questions.

And with the practice tests, level of difficulty is important too. If the questions on a non-official practice test are just too hard then you may run completely out of time and draw the conclusion that you have serious time management issues that you don’t actually have. And the score that the tests output may lead you to believe that you are doing much better or much worse than you actually are – test prep companies try their best to approximate the scoring algorithm of the actual GMAT, but no one knows exactly how the algorithm works so the scoring system on third party practice tests is bound to be at least a little bit inaccurate (and in some cases it can be wildly inaccurate).

The official guide books and the official GMATPrep tests, on the other hand, present real questions that appeared on previous GMATs (which means that the questions underwent a rigorous vetting process before they ever made it onto the exam). The distribution of questions, both in the books and on the tests, is a good representation of what appears on the actual GMAT. And the scoring algorithm on the GMATPrep tests is the actual scoring algorithm that is used on the GMAT.

So people, please, please use the official GMAT resources!!! Again it is fine and even helpful to use third party resources to help you master the foundational material and learn how to approach the questions more strategically and effectively. But when it comes to practice you MUST use official questions. And when it comes to taking practice tests and gauging your overall performance, you MUST use the official GMATPrep practice tests!

The newest edition of the GMAT Official Guide books has just been released so a post dealing with the changes is in order. The books claim to contain 25% new questions (though that is not exactly accurate). Even still, this is a pretty big deal, especially after successive new editions of the books offered few or no new questions!

There have been some other posts out there dealing with some of the nitty-gritty details so I don’t want to restate what has already been stated…instead I am going to make some general observations. If you are looking for a question-by-question breakdown of which questions are new to this edition and an analysis of the general character of these new questions, there is a good book review by brother-in-arms GMAT tutor Andrew Geller from AtlanticGMAT over on Amazon.com, so feel free to take a look at that review for a slightly more granular level of analysis.

Again, the fact that these new books contain 25% new questions is a pretty big deal. Unfortunately, fewer of them are at that high level of difficulty that we would probably like to see (there are no new problem solving questions above #155), but it is still refreshing to see some new material out there from GMAC. Overall there aren’t too many surprises and most of the questions will look familiar to anyone who has seen and understands the wealth of official GMAT questions that are out there. It’s a standardized test of course, so it should come as no surprise that the structures are standardized and that the questions test all of the same stuff, albeit with slightly different presentations.

One thing that I would take issue with is the claim that there are 25% “new” questions. For the casual observer that would appear to be the case and for most GMATers the fact that some of the questions might not be altogether new should not really be a cause for concern since most people will not have come across these repeats. But in going through the questions it was clear to me that some of these “new” questions have appeared before – I couldn’t always place where but for sure some have appeared in older versions of the OG and I recognized at least one that was from the old GMATPrep tests that existed before the new software replaced them in 2013. Again for most people this won’t be a big deal because most people won’t have encountered these questions before, but if you have been using the old GMATPrep software (as I often have my students do) or if you have gone outside the main sources of official questions then you may recognize some of them.

So should you buy the new versions of the books? It depends. Obviously if you are just starting out and don’t have the books yet then you should get this latest edition. If you already have the OG books, I probably wouldn’t bother unless you have already worked through most of the official questions that are out there. Question Pack 1 is probably a better bang for your buck if you haven’t already used that since it gives you 400 new questions for $25. Once you have exhausted those then I would probably by the new Official Guide books for the new questions that they contain.

In short, it is nice to see a new Official Guide series that actually contains a sizeable number of “new” questions! For GMAT-lovers like me, it is like Christmas in June!