GMAT Prep Default Exam Pack vs. Exam Pack 1

[Levent-g]

Hi all,

Has anybody made experiences with those 2 Packages. I have following impression:

-Exam Pack 1 is more difficult, leads to approax. 50 points lower.
-Especially in the sentence correction part it differs from what I have experienced when I practiced with OG Books and the default GMAT pack. What I mean is for instance in the OG answer choices including "Being" or "Instead" or Answer choices which were not part of a group of answer choices were almost always wrong, whereas in the exam pack 1 it seems that this different.

I am now wondering if all these "fast rules" which developed unconsciously are treated different in the real exam? ( I know that there is no guaranty with these rules, but still people are following them because of experience and it would of course be very irritating and could lead to a much weaker result).

Thanks for any feedback.

Levent

[StaceyKoprince]

The "fast rules" that you're referring to - don't think of them as "fast rules" any longer. Don't use things like "being is wrong 95% of the time" to skip over actually thinking things through. Think of them as "if I HAVE to guess, then I'll play the odds... but I'm really just guessing now."

I've seen multiple OG problems, including ones from 10 years ago, in which (for example) "being" is in the correct answer.

I have not heard any systematic comments that the Exam Pack 1 exams are harder than the others. But maybe I just haven't heard from enough people yet. :)

In general, though, the real test has a standard deviation of about 30 points. Our tests have a standard deviation of about 50 points. I haven't heard a standard deviation published for the GMAT Prep exams, but would expect it to be between 30 and 50 points. In other words, the "drop" that you're seeing may not be an actual drop. That might be within the normal range expected on these kinds of tests.

The really valuable lesson here is to stop letting yourself get away with "easy" rules that aren't really rules. It's completely fine to use those when you get stuck, but not when you're still trying to do your best to get a question right. :)