Achieve Top Percentile Scores With Official GMAT Practice Questions

On this page, you will find only official sample GMAT questions along with links to the correct answers and detailed explanations.

Maybe you’re wondering—why the emphasis on official practice questions?

As you may have already learned, there are a number of places you can find GMAT practice material:

Textbooks published by large test prep companies
Online and app-based question banks
Free and paid resources published by GMAC

Maybe in your GMAT preparation, you’ve already used some of the resources above. Maybe you’ve even started to combine sources, thinking “the more practice questions I can solve, the better”. This is a natural assumption— but unfortunately, it’s not true.

When it comes to getting a good score on your GMAT exam, the quality of the practice questions matters more than the raw number of questions you have solved.

To understand why, you need to understand what the GMAT is really testing—and why official material is the only material that can truly prepare you for test day.

What the GMAT Exam Tests

It’s a common misconception that the GMAT assesses your proficiency in math and your knowledge of verbal content—in short, that the exam is content-based. Unfortunately, when it comes to GMAT prep, getting the correct answer to a content-based question is not enough.

In actuality, the GMAT is a comprehensive measure of your critical and quantitative reasoning abilities, emphasizing the approach you take in applying core principles and concepts in a creative and effective manner.

Unsurprisingly, both of these factors are useful predictors of performance in business (and in business school). This is why admissions committees at top MBA programs rely so heavily on your GMAT score when evaluating your application.

It’s also why, when preparing for the GMAT, you need to become adept at thinking in the mode the test mandates. When you use unofficial material—think third-party textbooks and apps—you aren’t able to replicate this thinking.

Why Official GMAT Practice Questions?

Did you know that, on average, it takes 12 months to develop an official GMAT question? Every question has to strictly adhere to the guidelines set by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC), necessitating a 7-stage process that involves quality control, fairness review, calibration, and optimization.

Needless to say, this is an expensive process, but the result is a finely-crafted question characterized by initial difficulty when solving the problem and a pleasing simplicity upon review (how did they get me to make that mistake?!?!).

This unique quality of official GMAT questions combined with the long, labor- and cost-intensive procedure required to produce them is simply not reproducible for large test prep companies. Instead, test prep companies boasting thousands of sample questions are relying on cheap imitations of the real thing.

As a result, well-meaning test-takers are deceived into thinking that more practice questions—regardless of their source—will necessarily lead to improvement. Besides wasting valuable study time, this belief can also sidetrack your GMAT preparation efforts, leading you away from the critical-thinking and problem-solving skills that the GMAT exam is designed to assess.

Free GMAT Sample Questions

With all this in mind, the importance of working with official GMAT practice questions cannot be overstated.

Official GMAT material offers a glimpse into the meticulous design and thought process behind the actual exam questions, ensuring that you are practicing with problems that mirror the test’s format, content, and difficulty level. This alignment is crucial for developing the specific reasoning skills and pattern recognition required to excel on the GMAT.

To see this process in action, our Head of Test Prep Chris Kane deconstructs official problems using our best practices in the articles below:

Danger: Avoid Unofficial Practice Tests At All Costs

While it’s often said that practice makes perfect, not every GMAT practice test was created equal. Preparing with unofficial practice tests could potentially damage your chances in the exam.

The official GMAT practice questions and the GMAT exam itself are the result of a layered, intricate, and thorough process undertaken by skilled professionals.

For the same reason that GMAT practice questions are expensive and difficult to produce, creating a GMAT practice test is even more difficult—particularly considering the exam’s question-level adaptability.

While practicing with these tests, you run the risk of ingraining bad habits and the wrong approach, while growing accustomed to something that feels different than the real exam.

Menlo Coaching offers a comprehensive GMAT prep course focusing exclusively on official GMAT practice questions led by experienced coaches to help you achieve your desired score. By deconstructing thousands of official questions over a 20-year period, we have developed the optimum strategies and approaches for success on the real exam, not a “fake” exam that we have created with low-quality unofficial questions.