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The new GMAT Official Guide 2018 books have landed and I’ve got the scoop for you! (If you’d like, you can start with the first installment of this article series.) Today’s post focuses on Data Sufficiency. Read more

The new Official Guide books are here! Last time, we talked about the Quant portion of The Official Guide for GMAT, aka the OG or the big book. In this installment, we’ll discuss the Verbal section of the big book. Later installments will talk about the Quant Review and Verbal Review (the smaller books), as well as question lists for the new questions.

(Note: I have not yet had time to analyze the IR problems that come via your special online access. I’ll get to that soon—the quant and the verbal are higher priority!)

Part 1 included an overview of the changes to the whole book; I’ve included that overview here as well (the next section!), in case you’re reading this installment first. (The only difference is one sentence in the first paragraph.)

What’s new in OG 2016?

Approximately 25% of the questions are brand new, and there are some beauties in the mix. As I worked through the problems, I marveled anew at the skill with which the test writers can produce what I call elegant problems. On the verbal side, I loved how some of the new questions wove meaning into the issue of Sentence Correction; if you have been focusing on grammar and shortchanging meaning, you’re definitely going to need to change your approach.

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Businessweek is following up on the recent enforcement action by GMAC against a website, Scoretop, that illicitly gave students access to ‘real’ GMAT questions. It’s very interesting reading.

Perhaps the most fascinating effect is that students who used the now-defunct site may be barred from applying to Business School, or even expelled if they’re already in a program! GMAC is now reportedly going through Scoretop’s hard drives to find the identities of past users of the site, with serious repercussions for confirmed users.

The lesson is that you may want to be careful what resources you use to prepare for the GMAT, as the consequences could be FAR worse than a subpar score. Certainly run the other way if anyone purports to have ‘real’ questions, as the only publicly available questions are available from GMAC itself (the Official Guides, GMAT Prep, GMAT Focus, old paper tests). Note that ManhattanGMAT recommends all of GMAC’s resources as the best and only way to get access to GMAT questions straight from the source. As we’re fond of saying around here at MGMAT, there really are no shortcuts to getting a high score!