The "OG," 11 ed.

I got the "Original Gansta"...er, uh "Official Guide" to the GMAT a couple weeks ago. I never had the 10th edition, so the 11th is all I've known. The book claims on page 10 that the questions are ordered in each section "from easy to difficult." I wanted to see how true this was, with the idea that easy questions appearing late in a section would indicate the question types that get more value than their difficulty warrants (to me at least).

I decided to grade the questions on a subjective 3 point scale of difficulty as I went through the book, just to test this theory. The scale is simple:

• 1: the solution should be immediately obvious with no tricks needed.
• 2: some insight is required to solve the problem, but once you have that insight, actually solving it is straightforward.
• 3: a difficult question. Not only do you have to be clever to see how to solve it, there are several steps in getting to the solution or understanding the problem. These are the type I would expect to be in the program's "700+" bin of questions.
• I allowed myself the occassional '+' or '-' modifier, too. The '3+' questions probably stumped me, and may have even made me angry at the testmaker.
  

Now, I had grand dreams of rating all of the 800 or so problems in the book at one point, but considering that the test is only a couple of days away, I've resigned myself to the fact that I will have done less than 200 of them by the time I test. That said, I did do some samples to see if they truly do get more difficult as you go through them. Here's what I found:

My rating for the Problem Solving questions, numbers 1-20:
1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 1-

Same section, numbers 200-220:
2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2-, 3+, 2, 2, 3+, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 2+, 3, 3, 2, 3

So, yes, the questions do generally appear to get harder as you go. If they are truly in order of difficulty, certain topics (long word problems, standard deviation, and simultaneous equations?) are rated as highly difficult by the computer, even if the mechanics of solving the problem are simple. My guess is that lots of test takers have been intimidated by these question types, getting them wrong more often than other types. That leaves some pretty easy questions in the "difficult" bin if you are not the type to be flustered by those types.

In other words, learning the simple tricks to solve those problem types will give you the most bang for your buck when you're studying.