CHAPTER 2

Understanding the CAT

• The CAT Explained
• Are the First Questions More Important?
• The Importance of Pacing
• Other CAT Strategies

The GMAT is a computer-adaptive test, or CAT. The test is called “adaptive” because, in the course of a section, the test notices whether you answered the previous question correctly or incorrectly and “adapts” in its selection of the next question.

A few basic rules make the adaptive format possible:

• You’re presented with one question at a time, and you must answer it to move on to the next question.
• You can’t return to previously answered questions within a section.
• You can’t skip questions—or rather, the only questions that can be skipped or omitted are any questions at the end of a section that you leave unanswered.
• Within a section (Quantitative or Verbal), the questions are not grouped by topic or type. You don’t, for example, finish Reading Comprehension and then move on to Sentence Correction and then to Critical Reasoning; those three question types are interspersed with one another throughout the section.