Difficulty level of the OG

[trf05]

Hi all,

I have a few questions regarding the difficulty level of the Official Guides...

I'm using the 11th Edition and Quantitative/Verbal review to practice for the exam. It says on the books that the questions are in order of difficulty, but how do I know the approximate level of the questions? Is that true for all the questions on all the Guides?

For example, there are 249 questions on the PS section of the 11th edition. Does anyone know around which questions the level of the problems starts to go above 600 and then 700? Same thing for the 155 questions on the DS section? I don't need to know the exact level or anything, just a general idea of around which number I should expect to see the harder questions.

Also, are the Reading Comprehension problems in order of difficulty as well? Where can I find the 700+ problems for the Verbal Section in the Official Guides?

I finished the course last week, I've taken 4 practice exams and I'm really improving, but it's hard to figure out how I'm doing as far as the official guides go. I see that I get more wrong answers the closer I get to the end of a section of the guide, so it would be very useful to know the approx. level of the questions I'm getting wrong!!

Thank you!!

[StaceyKoprince]

Nobody knows for sure, unfortunately, because no info about specific difficulty levels have been published. Also, although they do generally get harder, it's not a perfect correlation - sometimes you see things that are higher-numbered but easier than other things that are lower-numbered.

Generally, maybe the first 20-40 questions are sub-500 level, the bulk of the questions are in the 500-700 level and maybe the last 50-75 questions are 700+.

The Reading Comp questions, though, are not in order of difficulty - they are in chronological order according to what information they test from the passage.

Unfortunately, you can't use the OG to gauge what your score would be like - the adaptive nature of the test makes it impossible to use a static book to approximate your score.

[aaron.m.ellsworth]

Is it still true that the last 40-50 questions of each section of the OG 11 or 12 are representative of 700+ level questions on the actual gmat? I have just heard that due to the inflated levels of quant jocks taking the test, the quant section has increased in difficulty level from years past. Any insight?

[StaceyKoprince]

The questions sometimes look surprisingly straightforward... until you fall into a trap. Once people study them and see the explanations, then they think, "Oh, these are easy!" But they're really not. The test writers are just really good at writing deceptively simple but really quite tricky questions.

Now, if someone goes into the test and scores a 51 (99th percentile) on Quant, well yes, that person is going to think that the vast majority of the OG questions are easy. And they would be, for that person, although there are still some questions in the books that are 99th percentile levels. But that person's going to look at a 90th percentile question and say "hey, that's easy!" But that's exactly what a "700+" level question is - 90th percentile.

So, in a nutshell... it all depends on your perspective. Remember that all of the 99th percentile testers out there did study from the OG, too - those are the only real questions in the game - so they must work!

The real distinction? How deeply you study / pick apart the problems. Do you ask yourselves these kinds of questions when reviewing problems?
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