GMAT Strategy

Im scoring in the mid 600's for the Kaplan CATs. Are the questions from the Kaplan CAT's reflective of the actual GMAT questions? Some people have told me that the Kaplan questions are too easy and nothing like the GMAT questions. Is this true? Im concerned now that I have prepared with a Kaplan Prep course

Hi there,

Rest assured that the online CATs used in our courses are continually assessed and updated to ensure validity and accuracy, which means that practice test scores are a good indicator of your actual score level. Kaplan has the most experience preparing students for the GMAT, prepares more people each year for the exam than anyone else, and a recent Harris poll showed that more people actually get into business school with a Kaplan GMAT course than any other course...so do not despair or over-worry about your preparation choice!

You may hear comments that the "Kaplan CATs score too low", which is referring to the fact that our retail/publishing division has included until this year, a CDROM version of our CATs, which is NOT updated continually in the manner that our online CATs are (and all students who take an actual course with us receive access to our 9 online/updated CATs). The publishing division has, this year, allowed online access as well to book-buyers, so I always recommend if you are just prepping with a book, do the CATs online, not on a CD. They'll be removing the CD with the next potential opportunity. As long as you are taking online CATs, you are using the most current and realistic CATs.

Anyway, the most important thing to remember is that no one practice test score should be taken as indicative of exactly what you'll score on test day, and if you are not finished with your studies yet especially, you should still plan on improvement to your scoring. Focus on your actual breakdown and strengths and weaknesses, and learn from each practice CAT that you take...use them as study tools; that is one of the best ways to improve.

Good luck and let us know if you have other questions!

Jen, thanks for the reply. I have been taking my CAT's online, so I'm a bit relieved to read your response. It's just that some of the verbal answer choices from Kaplan are transparent. Kaplan uses such strong language in some of the choices, that the answer becomes quite simple to pick due to process of elimination.


"X will never Y..."

"Y always wins..."

"The ONLY solution for X is"


I'm just not sure if the actual GMAT uses such strong language. These choices are consistently wrong.

Hi,

Glad to help with your concerns overall. It's hard to comment without looking at specific questions and their frequency, and I'm not sure how many CATs you've taken, because there is a pool of thousands of questions from which any CAT's questions are pulled...so in all likelihood, perhaps it was a coincidence if you had a couple of similiar questions, but a common type of wrong answer for Critical Reasoning (and sometimes Reading Comp) IS an an answer choice that is more extreme than what you read....and that does occur on the GMAT as well. Many test-takers, before they learn to recognize this, do fall into this trap because often the author was CLOSE to saying a statement like this, but they did not go to this extreme. So congrats on recognizing these types of wrong answers.

The best thing to do moving forward is to use your Smart Reports to analyze your performance in the specific content areas and question types, and you'll be able to see what you need to work on the most. If you are scoring in the 600's, you are doing better than the average test-taker and there is definitely potential to keep improving a decent amount, and yet there must be some areas of weakness as you aren't to the top score levels yet...so take those aspects that you ARE doing well on as a plus, and focus on the areas still tripping you up.

Again, best of luck!