Questions, Questions!

Not all GMAT practice questions are equal. Learn to spot substandard GMAT questions so you don’t waste precious study time and energy.

by Brent Hanneson and David Sovka, GMAT Prep Now.

Just like your grandmother probably told you, the secret to getting good at anything – golf, piano, quantum physics – is to practice, practice, practice. It’s certainly true for success on the GMAT. Once you learn the necessary concepts, you need to practice answering questions that test those concepts. The relationship is simple: the more you practice, the better you will do on the GMAT.

Take a look at the following GMAT practice question (WARNING: do NOT spend more than 30 seconds trying to answer it):

The reason you shouldn’t spend any time on the above question is that its solution requires skills that are not tested on the GMAT! It’s a complete waste of time and energy (not to mention unnecessarily scaring the crap out of you because you’ve never seen this kind of question in any official GMAT resource).

Preparing for the GMAT means just that: preparing FOR THE GMAT, not preparing for the LSAT, or the GRE, or any other standardized test. There’s not enough time in the day, and your brain is busy enough with learning the actual GMAT-tested concepts that you will see on test day.

Rule #1: Find out what is tested on the GMAT, and don’t waste time on “out of scope” material.

Substandard questions can be discouraging and counterproductive. When students see an “out of scope” practice question that they can’t answer, they naturally worry. Some then learn concepts that the GMAT doesn’t test, and some may feel that they are not suited to write the GMAT and quit their pursuit of an MBA.

It’s easy – and free – to find out which concepts are tested on the GMAT. Go to the official GMAT site, or review the content of a good GMAT prep company (every reputable one will publish exactly what you will learn with them before you buy their services).

Sometimes – for example, on a GMAT forum – when an expert declares a practice question as “out of scope,” someone will say, “Yeah, but it’s still useful information to know.” After all, math and verbal skills are important, right? And there's no such thing as too much knowledge.

We disagree. In the context of preparing for the GMAT, you can know too much!

Rule #2: Learn how to spot substandard questions, and ignore them.

The best way to learn how to avoid wasting time on bad GMAT practice questions is to fully understand how each section of the GMAT works–both the structure of the questions and the kinds of things that are asked (and not asked). Any practice question that deviates from the norm should be ignored.

Another hint that a question may be “out of scope” is when you see no Expert responses for several hours after the question is posted on a GMAT discussion forum. Of course, sometimes that might be because students have answered the question so thoroughly that there's no need for an Expert to respond. However, if all of the responses are in the form of guesses/answers (e.g., "I think the answer is B"), and an Expert hasn't responded, then it probably isn't a good question. We see this frequently with Verbal questions. There are many bad Verbal questions floating around, especially with Sentence Correction.

Remember that English grammar is a gigantic field of study, and one that is chock full of inconsistencies and rigorous debate among grammarians. The GMAT tests a small subset of this field of study. The bad practice questions are those that focus on concepts that the GMAT doesn't test.

Here are some more indications of substandard questions (really just a few teasers to encourage you to look into this more closely):

• Quantitative answer choices that are not listed in ascending or descending order
• 4 answer choices
• Questions about normal distributions
• Questions that require too many steps to answer
• Questions requiring too much accuracy (e.g., requiring a calculator)
• Unusually verbose questions
• Critical Reasoning questions involving formal logic (contrapositive, etc.)
• Zero answer choices (for example, proof questions, as in "prove that the 3 angles in a triangle add to 180 degrees”)

What’s really going on here?

GMAT preparation companies know that students need lots of practice questions, which has led to many sources of questions, some of them extremely dodgy. Don’t waste your time and energy on practice questions from “Krazy Eddie’s GMAT Question Warehouse.” There’s really no substitute for the official GMAT questions. They spend thousands of dollars developing every question. That’s because EVERY question is tested, refined and made perfect before it ever is seen by students.