Urgent: Need Help Navigating Question Bank

[tanvi_agt]

All,

I have been doing MGMAT since early 2023, took my GMAT once and retaking it. I have not yet figured out the entire question bank. I have reached out to support team, but heard that the question banks related to the strategy guide (+foundation) and CATs are the only question banks. I am not sure if this the accurate answer. Students, Experts, any help is highly appreciated. Thanks!

For instance, I find questions like this (thankfully) on a popular forum (name omitted), that says source: Manhattan GMAT, but I could never find anything like those in my materials.

Letter to the editor: The Senate recently voted to keep the estate tax, a levy imposed on the transfer of property of the estate of a deceased person to a living person or organization. The primary argument in favor of the estate tax is that it is a necessary component of a system of progressive taxation. Not only is this argument faulty, but the estate tax is also lousy for the economy. Primarily, the estate tax directly penalizes savings and investment, two activities that are vital to create and sustain jobs. Furthermore, the estate tax undermines a strong work ethic by devaluing the link between work and reward.

[StaceyKoprince]

This question is one of ours but it is not from the question banks—it's from the practice exams.

There is no way to see this problem unless it is given to you on a practice exam. And there are a couple of thousand questions in the practice exam database (at varying levels of difficulty), so you'll never see all of the questions in our practice exam database.

Separately, I would be very cautious about browsing through forums for "new" problems (that you haven't seen before) for three reasons:

(1) You are potentially "spoiling" yourself for your practice exams. If you have already seen some of the questions before, then the score you earn on that practice exam is artificially inflated.

(2) I have seen questions attributed to Manhattan Prep that were not actually written by us. I have also seen questions labeled official questions that were not actually official questions. When I see these, the questions are usually poor quality. (At one point, there were PDFs floating around that claimed to be hundreds of official problems. At least half of the problems were not official problems—and they were poor quality problems that I wouldn't recommend studying from.)

(3) I have seen questions posted that actually were from MPrep or OG / official sources—but they were transcribed incorrectly, so the problem was broken in some way. I have seen problems posted in which the correct answer was listed as (B) when it was actually (C)—and then I'd see long threads with people trying to justify why (B) was the correct answer...except it wasn't the correct answer. I have seen people (presumably accidentally) insert errors into the problem—grammar errors on SC, for example, or mistyping a number on a math problem, or leaving out some of the information needed to solve.

I strongly recommend getting your problems from the source author first (MPrep, official guide, whatever). If you then want additional help, search for that problem in your preferred forums and read what other people say about it. But don't start from problems that are posted on those third-party forums...for all of the reasons that I listed above.

[tanvi_agt]

Thank you @StaceyKoprince.
How many times can I reset and retake the 6 CATs and not get all repeated questions? I am assuming there will be some repetitions and that is OK. MGMAT only has 200 questions as part of the Question bank which is not at all sufficient, IMO. MGMAT verbal being one of the best, I want to practice more. Any suggestions?

Thanks again.

[StaceyKoprince]

After the first 6 tests, we can't guarantee that there won't be repeats, but there are a couple of thousand questions in the database, so chances are that you won't see that many repeats for at least the first 1 or 2 tests, maybe more.

This can vary depending on how your score level is changing, though. If you're mostly staying in the same scoring level within a section, then you'd see more repeats sooner. If your score is changing (increasing hopefully!), then the test will start pulling from higher difficulty questions, so you won't be seeing as many repeats as soon.

And, of course, if you've forgotten a question...then it will feel new to you, even if it is a repeat. So if you are planning to do this, I would recommend not going back to study from practice tests that you took a while ago. Let yourself forget those questions!

I assume you also have the Official Guide, already? Another great source of good hard questions is the Advanced Official Guide—it has about 300 really hard official questions (half quant and half verbal). (Note: It was built for the Classic GMAT, not GMAT Focus, so it does include Sentence Correction and geometry.)