MG quant questions

[imtrying]

Earlier I asked a question about the slowness in the CAT server. Now it's time to complain about the slowness of my brain.

I noticed the MG quant questions are markedly harder than the real GMAT ones, i.e., Official guide, and GMATPrep tests

I had the chance to finish the GMAT OG book and one GMATPrep Official mock test before I recently started to work on the MG CAT as well as the MG challenge problems. The first quant test I took, I most definitely would have flunked. I consider almost all of them hard to hardest on the real GMAT scale. Discounting the slowness of the CAT server during the test, I would still have spent 25min on top of the 75m I set for the section. Half way through, I told myself to forget about the pacing, and just tried to finish the questions.

The first MG CAT was also noticeably harder than the second one, which I think took me about 85 m in total (not an accurate figure, as the server was again disruptive at times). I compared the difficulty levels between the two and came to realize that if I disregarded pacing, and made sure answers were good, later questions would have to come from the more difficult bins. So, though I got 10 wrong in the first test (100min), and 6 wrong in the second (85min), I scored 51 for both.

I don't have as much of an issue on timing with the verbal section. They feel about right, compared with the official problems.

I'm a bit worried as I read on this forum that MG still more or less reflects what the real exam is, despite the error margin. I did score 750 (quant untimed) on both exams, and with the one GMAT Prep test I did a 780 (because it kind of rehashed a small set of questions from the Official Guide) and felt the quant there was easier. I'm confused now whether I should focus on Verbal or Quant given the bad timing I got on the MG quant.

So, on the difficulty level and the timing for MG quant, what is your experience/opinion?

Thanks a lot!

[imtrying]

I also wrote about this in another post.

Finished my third CAT. And again got 51 quant, 41 V at 750.

I read a discussion between Stacey and a student on this forum and understood the importance of getting things done on time. So this time, I rushed through the quant within 70 minutes with my own clock, considering that I also had to hit stop/refresh multiple times for each question in order to get through the sections.

I haven't taken a look at my result report but i guess that I may have got more hard questions wrong and as a result the difficulty level is less than CAT 1 and possibly CAT 2.

Given that the my CAT 3 quant grade still ranks 99%, I figure deliberation does not pay really in the case of GMAT. The more hard questions one get right, the more hard one s/he will get. Unless the test taker is a genius, s/he's likely to run out of time on a full set of hard questions.

Am I right?

[StaceyKoprince]

I do think that our quant sections can feel harder than the real test, especially for very high-level test takers. Our tests do not include experimental questions, while the real tests do. Approx. 25% of the questions in each section are experimental and they are not tied to difficulty levels or how you're scoring. So if you are a very high-level quant person, then you are going to have a number of "easy" (for you) experimental questions, which will both take you lost time and provide you with a "brain break." You don't get these on our tests. (We would love to include experimental questions eventually, but that's going to take some time.)

At the same time, please do NOT take practice tests with any timing other than the official timing - not if you're going to assume that the scores from those tests are valid for you. There's an enormous difference between taking this untimed or with extra time and taking this with the very limited time we are actually given. If you practice untimed or with extra time, you can easily develop some habits that are completely contrary to how you would want to take the official test. This is a recipe for scoring 100+ points lower than you could / should on the test. I've seen it happen.

Think about it this way: it's better to have your practice tests be somewhat more challenging than the real thing, not somewhat less challenging!

imtrying is exactly right: our reward for getting a bunch of really hard questions right is even harder questions! If you keep trying to the point of spending lots of extra time, you will run out of time towards the end. If you run out of time towards the end, one of two things is going to happen: you're going to leave some blank at the end, or you're going to have to make a bunch of random guesses at the end (and probably get most of those wrong).

The penalty for leaving a question blank is 3 percentile points per question.

If you have a string of 4+ wrong answers in a row, the penalty averages about 2 to 2.5 percentile points per question.

These penalties are extremely severe and have the potential to kill your score if things get out of hand.