When you are starting your GMAT preparation, it is essential that you use official GMAT practice questions. Why? The GMAT test exists to assess very particular skills and abilities that predict your success in business school.
The writers of the actual exam questions on the these standardized tests—employees at the non-profit organization ACT—follow very specific guidelines to make sure that the questions are truly assessing what the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) wants them to assess: higher-order thinking (critical thinking, pattern recognition, etc.) and problem-solving skills.
Understand that the GMAT exam is not a math test, a grammar test, or a reading test:
Take a look at our guides to answering official GMAT practice questions by topic to learn how to prepare yourself for the GMAT exam!
As such, the goal is not to assess how well you know obscure content or difficult math concepts, but rather how efficiently and creatively you apply core knowledge to solve different types of problems. It evaluates your critical reasoning as well as your problem-solving skills.
Instead of focusing on the right answer when looking for GMAT practice tests, learning the correct approach and how to train your thinking, is what will guide you to the right answer choice.
To practice with official test material—and gain expert advice on how to approach each example problem on the actual test day—check out our pages covering multiple free GMAT practice questions.
Enroll in our GMAT prep course to effectively prepare for the exam with official practice questions and expert analysis.
GMAT prep is crucial for success at the actual exam, but when you are looking for a GMAT practice test, you should be aware of some of the issues with many of the GMAT practice questions out there.
A majority of unofficial free GMAT practice tests made by test prep companies miss this mark in one way or another, particularly on the verbal side of the exam. When you prepare with too many unofficial practice questions, you develop bad habits and you don’t prepare for the type of difficulty you will actually see on the exam.
There is a reason that official GMAT sample questions cost on average more than $2500 per question to make: expert item writers use the institutional knowledge of GMAC and ACT to create consistently “unique” questions assessing certain abilities, and then they vet the questions tirelessly to make sure they are perfect.
In a word, these questions are brilliant—they are difficult to attack initially yet generally simple in retrospective analysis, a quality that is challenging for test prep companies to replicate.
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Additionally, I would guess that of the 1000 official questions that appear as scored items on the actual exam over a certain time period, no more than 5 of those end up having marginal issues that lead to their removal as “unfair” or flawed. For unofficial questions, I would guess that number is literally 200 per 1000 (mostly subtle issues on verbal questions) with many of the other “valid” questions not really mimicking the type of difficulty for which you should be preparing.
Having written as many unofficial GMAT sample questions as anyone in the test prep industry, I know how painstaking it is to create “perfect” questions, and most question writers working for the big test prep companies simply do not spend the time necessary to capture the real exam questions (mainly because the writers are financially incentivized to write them quickly, or because they don’t really understand how to build questions that test higher-order thinking).
Knowing this is a crucial step in deciphering the answer choices on the GMAT.
Our 5-week GMAT prep course has “Refresh Modules” to help you remember the algebra, arithmetic, and logic you need to solve GMAT problems, and after that, we have our students practice exclusively with official GMAT practice questions. In both our courses and one-on-one GMAT tutoring sessions, we then thoroughly deconstruct these sample questions to show students why they are truly missing them.
Only through this detailed analysis of GMAT question types and actual GMAT questions can you really gain the skills and strategies needed to achieve a high score.
To highlight some of the difficulties present in real GMAT questions and the strategies required to solve them, let’s get a taste of the Menlo Coaching curriculum and deconstruct a GMAT sample question from each section represented on the GMAT test, by following these links to some free GMAT practice questions:
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