APPENDIX B
The following appendix is adapted from The GMAT Unlocked, a white paper from Kaplan’s Research Series. For more information, or if you’re interested in any of our classroom or tutoring programs, please visit our website at KaplanGMAT.com.
As you have seen throughout this book, every question has a difficulty level. This fact is an important part of the adaptive algorithm through which getting questions correct is “rewarded” with harder questions.
There’s a little more to this story. After all, in Chapter 2 of this book, you learned that on the computer-adaptive GMAT, the first question you see is an “average difficulty” question; that means approximately half the people get the question right and half the people get it wrong. In a sense, for all the people who got the question right, it’s an easy question, and in that same sense, it’s a hard question for all the people who got it wrong. The difficulty of the question can be described by this entire pattern of responses, rather than just the percentage who answered it correctly.