the GMAT OG
The Official GMAT™ Guide, or the OG, is undoubtedly one of your most dependable sources of practice for the GMAT. It contains approximately 900 to 1000 real, retired GMAT questions, which means they hold immense value for your preparation. These are the very types of questions that I've seen students encounter on test day for years.
But when you open this book, do you simply solve all the questions in order? Or can you do much more with it? In this post, I'll share three expert strategies I've developed over my career to help you extract the most out of this extremely valuable preparatory guide.
Tip 1: Practice in Small, Focused Blocks
When you start with the Official Guide, you might be tempted to tackle too many questions in a row—perhaps 25, 30, or even 40 at a stretch. While this might seem harmless, from my experience, it's a counterproductive strategy. After an hour or more of continuous problem-solving, you're unlikely to recall the specific thought process you had for the earlier questions. Worse, you might get exhausted and skip the crucial analysis phase.
Instead of long, marathon sessions, I strongly recommend practicing in small, manageable blocks of 5 to 10 questions. My personal recommendation is 5 questions at a time.
This approach allows for quality introspection. A set of 5 questions might take you 10-15 minutes. Immediately after, you can look back at every single question—both the right and the wrong ones. The tendency is to look only at incorrect outcomes, but I always tell my students not to ignore questions that turned out to be right. There could be a better way of solving them, or you might have gotten it right with a lucky guess. You must clarify why the correct option was right and, just as importantly, why the incorrect options were wrong. This deep analysis is only possible in small, focused blocks.
Tip 2: Leverage the Official Guide's Online Version
Every Official Guide comes with an access code that unlocks the entire book online. This digital version has a significant advantage that I always urge students to use: it records the time you take per question.
By creating your small practice sets online, you not only get to solve official questions but also see precisely how long each one took. This data is invaluable for honing your pacing. I advise my students to set internal standards for themselves based on the question's difficulty:
- Easy Questions: Target ~1 minute 30 seconds.
- Medium Questions: Target ~2 minutes.
- Hard Questions: Target ~2.5 to 3 minutes.
After each exercise, review your timing. If you're exceeding your target on a question—even if you got it right—you need to find out why. Is there a shortcut you missed? A concept you could apply more quickly? The online version gives you the data you need to turn good accuracy into great time management.
Tip 3: Strategically Save the Hardest Questions for Last
A common mistake I see students make is to finish the entire Official Guide with several weeks to go before their GMAT. If this happens, they find themselves without high-quality, reliable practice material during the most crucial final phase of their prep. They might end up using irrelevant or unreliable sources, which is a dangerous thing to do in the last 3-4 weeks.
My solution is to be strategic. Do not complete the entire OG right away. Instead, I recommend saving the top 25-30% of questions for the final weeks of your preparation.
These saved questions will naturally be the "Hard" ones. Attempting them in the final countdown to your exam, after you've covered all the concepts, serves multiple purposes. It gives you excellent practice against the toughest material, allows you to test your deep understanding of concepts, and helps you identify any lingering weak spots. When combined with full-length mock tests, I've found that this strategy of using the hardest OG questions at the end pays rich dividends and builds immense confidence for test day.