Since the GMAT Prep summit, we have been covering what the changes that were described there mean based on what Larry Rudner, GMAC vice president of research and development and chief psychometrician, has told us. Now he has written an official response, which we have re-posted below.  Hopefully this will further clarify what those differences consist of and how you can study for the GMAT successfully. You can find the original posting here.

Idioms, Sentence Correction, and the GMAT Exam

Recently there has been some discussion and questioning about the role and place of idioms and sentence correction as they apply to the skills tested in the GMAT exam.  Much of what has been written has been well reasoned but some of what has been written is only partially accurate or reflects some misconceptions. With this posting I hope to put these two important pieces of the GMAT exam in their proper place within the context of what the exam measures and how.

Read more

This is an update on Stacey’s previous articles, posted earlier this week.

Two very important things:

(1) Larry just got back into the office and was able to check on some of these idiom issues (he was traveling earlier this week). He was able to clarify that American-centric idioms and expressions are the ones that they have dropped / been dropping. Idioms that are not American-centric are still in. That’s all he’s told me so far – he said “more to come” in his email. I’ll let you know when I have more.

This, of course, begs the question: which ones are American-centric and which ones aren’t? Unfortunately, there isn’t a definitive list of the idioms which do get tested (and there are thousands of idioms in the language), so we can’t just point and say “study this, don’t study that.” My guess is that the ones that we see in OG12 have probably already been mostly stripped of American-centric idioms, because they published that after they decided to start getting rid of the American-centric stuff.

So the lesson there is to study what you see in official questions (which, interestingly, was what we already said before because there are, as we’ve noted, so many idioms in the language).  Also – if you have learned non-American English (British English, for example) and see something where you think “really? I thought that was ” – then ignore that one.

(2) I want to reiterate something else: these aren’t major changes, though they are news and we do want to take action. In particular, meaning has always been there – it’s just that there are proportionally more questions now. If you have been studying meaning, then you should be okay whether you have to answer 3 or 5 or 8 questions that hinge on meaning. (Note – I’m making those numbers up – we don’t know how many questions will test meaning.) And meaning has been on GMATPrep CATs and other CATs as well, so you have been seeing meaning issues when you take CATs.

If you have been neglecting meaning… then you have some work to do. But that would’ve been the case even if they hadn’t said they’ve got more questions that revolve around meaning now. 🙂

And re: the idioms, see above.