While the Sentence Correction strategies have vastly remained unchanged, GMAT has made sure that it penalizes the test takers for unwarranted shortcuts.  Further GMAT has increased the emphasis on Pronoun and Modifier rules substantially and reduced the focus on comparisons and idioms related questions.

 

GMAT has replaced 45 questions ( 7 passages ) with 43 questions ( 7 new passages). Two long passages were replaced by 2 short passages creating the balance between the long and short passages.  Two biology passages were replaced by one social science passage and 1 business related passages.  While the number of General and specific questions are the same, the number of inference questions has increased significantly.   Another observation is that roman-numeral questions have been removed indicating GMAT may move away from these types of questions.

However, the structure and tonality of the passages is the same as the 11th Edition passages.

 

There is no change in terms of questions numbers in Critical Reasoning  section.  GMAT has replaced 50 old questions with 50 new questions in the 12th Edition.  However, the proportion of various questions types has changed.  The number of weaken type of questions have decreased by 14(from 51 to 37), inference questions by 5(from 20 to 15), assumption questions by 3(from 19 to 16). On the other hand the notable fact is the significant increase in Minor questions types: Reasoning questions – from 3 to 13, an increase of 10 questions and  Evaluate questions – from 6 to 14, an increase of 8 questions.

Under Reasoning question types, GMAT has included 9 bold questions types in which two of the statements  in the argument are bolded and ask you to find the role  played by the bolded statements.

Problem solving questions have decreased by 19,  the largest decrease among all other sections. Also problem solving section has the lowest percentage (22%) of the new questions among all other sections.  GMAT  has removed 75 questions and added only 56 new questions in 12th Edition. While the topic wise there isn’t much changes, the notable one is the decrease in Fractions, Decimals and Percentage question types.  Further, through many interesting questions are added many hard questions were removed.

Data Sufficiency section has undergone the maximum change among all the sections of GMAT. 75 old problems were replaced by 94 new problems in 12th Edition. Data sufficiency section has almost 47 %, the maximum percentage, new problems among all the section. This strongly indicates GMAT may test more data sufficiency questions than the problem solving. Also another notable shift is significant reduction of Algebra related questions and an increase in Word Translations.

While Algebra type of questions reduced from 56 to 33, Word Translations types increase from 44 to 75. This doesn’t mean that Algebra is NO more important. In fact to solve word translations questions, greater understanding of Algebra is a Must.