GMAT Strategy

My students do also tell me that they think our quant section can be harder / take longer than GMATPrep quant sections. Partially I think that's because, as you note, some of our PS questions are too wordy or computation intensive. We weed these out as we find them (we track and analyze everyone's data as people take our CATs), but we also leave in some that are perhaps a bit too computation intensive simply because we want to make sure that you're prepared to move on when you get stuck on the real test!

It's also the case that our test does not include experimental questions (no practice tests do at this point, I believe). On the real test, experimental questions come at all difficulty levels, so the higher you are, the better chance that a particular experimental question is "below" your level - which means you can answer that question more quickly than usual and have extra time for other questions elsewhere.

The converse is also true, by the way: you can get an experimental question that is much harder than your "level" - and if you haven't trained yourself to move on within 2 minutes, you're going to spend too much time and mess yourself up later in the section.

Re: the probability comment, our algorithm allows you to get only a certain number of questions of a certain type or category on a single test. I don't know what the number is for probability (I've sent an email to our algorithm guy to ask), but I'd be highly surprised if the algorithm allowed you to get 5-6 probability questions on one test. I've had students mention something like this to me before ("I got five combinatorics questions on one test!") and, when we actually checked, it turned out that they hadn't - they just thought they had because they hated combinatorics and consequently remembered when they got one. After 2 or 3, they felt like they'd had more. It's kind of like how we mostly only notice when we're in the slow lane in a traffic jam.

Anyway, I'll let you know what our algorithm guy says when he gets back to me! Perhaps I'll be surprised!

Hey, just heard back on the probability issue. Our tests are set to give a minimum of 0 probability questions and a maximum of 2 on any single test. [EDITED: I originally posted 1 and 3, but it's actually 0 and 2.)

There is one way in which you could have gotten some additional questions that were not primarily about probability but still included the concepts: you could have gotten another question type (eg, combinatorics or VIC) that also included some elements of probability. (Questions can often cross multiple categories - but they will be categorized into the one major content area they cover.) By the same token, you might get only two "official" subject-verb agreement questions on SC, but you might have another question that primarily tests, say, parallelism and yet still has a sub-verb element to some of the answer choices.