GMAT Topics: Which Are Most Common?

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Last Updated on October 5, 2023

There is no getting around the fact that scoring high on the GMAT requires a substantial amount of study time for the vast majority of test-takers. A big part of the reason why GMAT prep requires so much time and effort is not that GMAT content is so hard to learn, but that there is so much of it to learn.

Understandably, then, pretty much all GMAT students wonder whether they can make their GMAT prep more strategic by spending the majority of their study time on certain topics and not worrying so much about other topics. In fact, one of the most common questions I hear from my students is, Which GMAT topics and question types am I most likely to see in the Quant and Verbal sections?

In this article, we’ll take a look at what the GMAT topics are and examine why the popular question of how common each topic is doesn’t have such a clear-cut answer. Most importantly, we’ll discuss why trying to find a concrete answer to that question is actually a poor use of your time.

First, let’s review what we can say for sure about the topics tested in the Verbal and Quantitative sections of the GMAT.

• GMAT Topics: What We Know For Sure
  • The GMAT Quant Section
  • The GMAT Verbal Section
• Using What We Know About What Is Tested
  • The GMAT Gives Few Chances For Success
  • GMAT Questions Are Multi-Layered
  • The GMAT is Unpredictable
• The Folly of Trying to Game the Test

GMAT Topics: What We Know For Sure

First, we know that, on any given GMAT exam, you’re going to see only 31 Quant questions and 36 Verbal questions, including experimental (unscored) questions. Let’s review the question types you’ll see in each of those sections of the GMAT.

The GMAT Quant Section

In the Quant section, about 2/3 of the questions you see will be Problem Solving (PS) questions (questions in which you must actually solve the problem). The other roughly 1/3 of the questions you see will be Data Sufficiency (DS) questions (questions in which you must determine whether you have enough information to solve the problem). So, you can expect about 20 or 21 of the Quant questions you see on the exam to be PS questions and about 10 or 11 to be DS questions.

In the broadest sense, these questions will cover concepts related to arithmetic, algebra, and geometry. These 3 broad categories are encompassed by 21 major GMAT Quant topics:

• Basic Arithmetic
• Linear and Quadratic Equations
• Number Properties
• Roots
• Exponents
• Inequalities
• Absolute Values
• General Word Problems
• Rates
• Work Problems
• Unit Conversions
• Ratios
• Percents
• Statistics
• Overlapping Sets
• Combinations and Permutations
• Probability
• Geometry
• Coordinate Geometry
• Sequences
• Functions

Each of these 21 topics break down into various subtopics, encompassing hundreds of concepts. For instance, within Number Properties, you have to learn about even and odd numbers, divisibility, remainders, units digit patterns, least common multiple, greatest common factor, and more. Number Properties happens to be the most wide-ranging topic tested in the GMAT Quant section, but make no mistake: every Quant topic contains multiple subtopics, any of which could pop up on your exam. For Linear and Quadratic Equations, you’ll need to study solving for one variable, solving for two variables, factoring, FOILing, the difference of squares, and more. For Rates questions, you’ll need to study average rates, converging rates, diverging rates, catch-up rates, catch-up and pass, and more. The list goes on.

We’ll talk more about what the wide range of concepts tested means in terms of strategically focusing your GMAT study. For now, let’s take a look at what we know about the GMAT Verbal section topics.

The GMAT Verbal Section

The GMAT Verbal section tests your skills in effective use of language, logical reasoning, and reading comprehension using 3 question types: Sentence Correction (SC), Critical Reasoning (CR), and Reading Comprehension (RC). Each of these question types comprises approximately 1/3 of the Verbal questions you will see on the exam, give or take. For instance, you could see 10 CR questions on your exam, or you could see 13. As we’ll discuss further in this article, nothing about the makeup of any one GMAT exam is entirely predictable!

The concepts tested in Verbal section can be categorized into 23 major topics:

As with Quant, the major topics that are tested in the Verbal section break down into multiple subtopics involving numerous concepts. For instance, when studying Pronouns and Antecedents in SC, you’ll need to learn about pronoun-antecedent agreement, multiple antecedents, missing antecedents, possessive antecedents, and more.

When studying Weaken the Argument questions in CR, you’ll need to learn about assumptions as weakeners, false dichotomies, cause-and-effect, pseudo-weakeners, weakening the wrong conclusion, and more.

When learning how to analyze passage structure in RC, you’ll need to learn about structural keywords, how sentences relate within a paragraph, how different paragraphs relate to each other, and more.

You’ll notice that there is some overlap in the CR and RC topics (duplicate topics were not counted twice in the total). Interestingly, although the skills you need are fundamentally the same for overlapping topics in CR and RC, the frequency with which you see those topics tested in CR and RC type may differ.

For instance, in Critical Reasoning, Weaken, Strengthen, and Assumption questions are the most common question types, whereas in Reading Comprehension, those question types are rare. (Primary Purpose questions are, generally speaking, the most common question type in RC.)

Now, what does this knowledge about Weaken, Strengthen, and Assumption questions in CR vs. RC tell us on a practical level? In other words, in what way would we change our study plan in light of the fact that these question types are common in CR but not in RC? After all, if for example we were to see 2 Weaken, 2 Assumption, and 1 Strengthen question in CR, and just 1 Assumption question in RC, we still needed to hone our skills in all of these question types to be prepared for GMAT Verbal, didn’t we? Would you say that you wasted your time studying Strengthen questions because you happened to see only 1 on your exam?

Had the dice rolled a different way, you could’ve easily seen a total of 3 Strengthen questions between CR and RC. In that case, wouldn’t you be glad you didn’t neglect that topic in your GMAT prep?

Let’s explore this last point further, because it’s an incredibly important one.

Using What We Know About What Is Tested

As we just saw, if there is one thing we can say for sure about the GMAT, it’s that there is A TON to learn for the Quant and Verbal sections — literally hundreds of concepts. Moreover, ANY of those hundreds of concepts could pop up on your exam, and there is no way to know what your exact mix of questions will be on any given exam. So, picking and choosing what to study based on data about which GMAT topics are most common is a very risky proposition. Let’s discuss a few reasons why.

The GMAT Gives Few Chances For Success

Despite the wide range of possible topics that could appear on any one GMAT exam, there are some general statements we can make about which GMAT topics are most common. For example, I mentioned earlier that, in CR, Weaken, Strengthen, and Assumption questions are more common than the other question types. Now, this may sound like really important information when you first hear it, but the funny thing is, it doesn’t really give you any advantage when preparing for the exam.

To illustrate my point, let’s consider a possible scenario. Say you see a total of 11 CR questions in the Verbal section of your exam, and 5 of those questions are Weaken, Strengthen, or Assumption. Well, you’re still left with 6 more CR questions — more than half of the total number of CR questions you’ll see — and 8 more CR topics that could possibly be tested in those remaining 6 questions. So, it’s conceivable that, on your exam, you could see at least 1 question on nearly every CR topic.

Now, if you’ve spent the vast majority of your CR study time focusing on Weaken, Strengthen, and Assumption questions, and a minimal amount of time on each of the other CR topics, you could end up underperforming on the majority of the CR questions you see. So, knowing that certain CR questions are more common than others would not have been particularly helpful to your overall Verbal performance.

The same goes for Reading Comprehension. Most RC passages you see will be followed by a question on the primary purpose (otherwise known as the main idea). You’re also going to see some Detail and Inference questions among the RC questions you face. However, even if between those 3 question types, we’ve accounted for 2/3 of the RC questions that appear on your exam, you still have the other third to worry about. Does being 66% prepared for Reading Comprehension sound good enough to you?

In other words, the fact that you’ll see Primary Purpose, Detail, and Inference questions in GMAT RC does not relieve you of the need to master all the other RC question types. Because, using our example above, if you just focus on those 3 common question types, you’re still going to get smoked on 1/3 of the RC questions you see.

The point is, as interesting as these facts are about which GMAT topics are more common than others, the fact remains that you need to be able to skillfully and efficiently handle questions on less commonly tested concepts as well if you want to score high on the exam. Remember, you have relatively few chances to drive up your score on the GMAT — just 36 chances in Verbal and 31 in Quant.

With so few questions in the Quant and Verbal sections of the GMAT, every question has the potential to have a significant impact on your section scores. This effect is even more pronounced in the GMAT Quant section, which contains 5 fewer questions than the Verbal section. With less than 31 opportunities (because some questions are experimental) to either increase or decrease your Quant score, the difference between “more common” and “less common” may not be all that great.

For instance, let’s say that theoretically we have some data that Geometry makes up roughly 15% of the questions you’ll see in the GMAT Quant section and Probability makes up roughly 5%. Using those figures as a guide, you expect to see 4 to 5 Geometry questions and 1 to 2 Probability questions on your exam. However, on test day, the Quant section you see includes 4 Geometry questions and 2 Probability questions. Would you feel that you had used your GMAT prep time wisely by studying the heck out of Geometry and neglecting to master Probability? I wouldn’t!

Now, you may still think that risking being unprepared for a couple of questions here or there is no big deal if it saves you serious study time by allowing you to skip certain GMAT topics. However, the very nature of GMAT questions makes picking and choosing GMAT topics a mistake. Let’s discuss.

GMAT Questions Are Multi-Layered

It would be nice and neat if each GMAT question covered just one concept, and no other knowledge was needed to answer the question. However, that’s not the world we live in. In reality, GMAT questions are multi-layered, often encompassing concepts from multiple topics. For instance, Geometry questions may incorporate concepts from Number Properties, or questions on Number Properties may require knowledge related to Probability. Furthermore, almost any topic could be tested in the form of word problems, and multiple topics may incorporate concepts from algebra.

So, if you’re studying only the topics you’ve heard are most common (such as Number Properties) and neglected the topics you’ve heard appear less (such as Probability), you may be surprised that your performance on those frequently occurring Number Properties questions isn’t as flawless as you expected, because you’re missing conceptual knowledge you need about other topics.

Subject-Verb Agreement in Sentence Correction provides a salient example of this misguided approach. If we’re just going by the numbers, issues of Subject-Verb Agreement show up quite frequently in the GMAT Verbal section. So, does that fact indicate that you should focus the bulk of your Sentence Correction study on Subject-Verb Agreement? If only the GMAT were so simple. The fact is, you’re not going to see Verbal questions testing Subject-Verb Agreement alone. For instance, many Parallelism questions and Comparisons questions contain Subject-Verb Agreement issues. However, if you’ve spent a ton of time on the “more common” topic of Subject-Verb Agreement, and you didn’t devote much time to the less common topics of Parallelism and Comparisons, all of the Subject-Verb Agreement knowledge in the world is not going to save you on those questions, and your score is going to suffer.

This last example brings up another important reason why data about what is on the GMAT may not be quite as useful as it seems when it comes to which GMAT topics are more or less common. In fact, the data on which you base a “selective” study plan could be flawed or misleading. Let’s discuss.

The GMAT is Unpredictable

While there are some generalities we can make about which GMAT topics most commonly appear on the exam, at a granular level, the GMAT exam is pretty unpredictable. The mix of questions test-takers see is random, and that mix is changing all the time. So, you can’t expect the mix of questions you see on official practice tests to match the mix you’ll see on the actual test. 

Think about it: would the test-makers provide GMAT students with 6 practice tests that were a “key” to the makeup they’d see on their actual exams? Would a teacher give you a copy of the final exam, so you could practice for that very exam? As convenient as seeing an “advanced copy” is, that scenario isn’t realistic.

The test-makers know that a large part of what makes the GMAT challenging is that there are so few questions on the test, yet so many concepts that could be tested. In other words, we can’t predict with any specificity exactly what we’ll see from one GMAT to the next — therein lies the challenge! 

The problem is that people often analyze data from past GMAT exams and official questions in an attempt to predict what current test-takers will see. But given the randomness and unpredictability of the GMAT, it’s very easy to get a “biased sample” when you analyze data from past tests. So, trying to draw granular conclusions based on what people have seen on exams in the past doesn’t really work.

For example, imagine the test-taker who sits for a GMAT exam that contains no Overlapping Sets questions and 1 Coordinate Geometry question. Thinking those topics are uncommon on the GMAT, the test-taker sits for the GMAT a second time, having devoted no study time to Overlapping Sets or Coordinate Geometry. On his retake, he sees 3 Coordinate Geometry questions and 1 Overlapping Sets question, and he scores even lower in Quant than he did the first time around. Of course, this is just a hypothetical, but the point is, if you’re not covering every GMAT topic in your prep, there is no guarantee that you’ll be prepared for every topic that appears on your exam.

In truth, the useful data we can glean from analyzing past GMAT exams or questions in the Official Guide are the same general conclusions we can draw based on what we already know about the GMAT syllabus. But I’ve got some good news for you: those general conclusions are really all we need. Let’s discuss.

The Folly of Trying to Game the Test

If you’re experiencing heart palpitations from hearing that the GMAT is unpredictable and that much of the data from past exams isn’t all that actionable, it’s time for a sigh of relief. You don’t need to know how frequently the various GMAT topics appear on exams in order to earn a great GMAT score. In fact, if your study plan covers all of the concepts that could be tested on the GMAT, you should naturally spend more of your study time on the most common topics. How can this be, you ask?

Here is the thing that people neglect to mention in their analyses of past GMAT exams. The reason certain topics, such as Number Properties, or Geometry, or Percents, appear more frequently than others on the GMAT is that there are more ways to test those topics. For example, there are more concepts that could be tested within Geometry than there are within Functions. So, you’ll probably see more questions that somehow test your knowledge of Geometry.

Remember, the GMAT isn’t seeking to ask you 10 times if you know the same two things; it wants to get a more holistic view of your Quant and Verbal skills. So, if there is a greater variety of concepts that can be tested in a particular topic, it makes sense that more questions on that topic would appear on the exam.

Of course, a reliable and effective GMAT prep course should mirror this structure. For example, we can say that Number Properties covers a large number of the questions you’ll see in the GMAT Quant section. This prevalence is no surprise, given the large number of concepts that can be tested in Number Properties. So, it makes sense that the TTP GMAT Course, for example, includes nearly as many lessons and practice questions on Number Properties as it does on Work Problems, Rates, Combinations and Permutations, and Probability combined (87 lessons and 309 practice questions vs. a total of 102 lessons and 372 practice questions, respectively). TTP users are just as thoroughly prepared to tackle the less common topics as they are to take on the very common topic of Number Properties. But, because there are fewer concepts to learn for the less common topics, less of the course is devoted to them. So, TTP users end up spending a higher proportion of their study time on the more common topics. Pretty cool, right?

If you use a GMAT prep course that covers all of the topics and subtopics that have the potential to appear on the exam — as you should — then you naturally will spend more study time on topics that tend to show up most frequently on the exam. Thus, unless you plan to cut certain topics out of your study plan altogether, a strategy we’ve already determined is not wise, the decision of what to “study more” is essentially made for you.

The moral of the story — and it’s a hard moral to hear — is that you can’t game the test. You must attack your GMAT prep with the mindset that anything on the list of possible GMAT topics and concepts could be on your test.

GMAT students who try to cut corners generally end up spending more time and energy (and more money) on their GMAT prep, only to get poor returns on test day. Don’t be one of the “unlucky” GMAT test-takers who sees 5 or 6 “uncommon” question types in a section and has studied only the most common topics. Particularly if the questions you miss are ones that the GMAT algorithm calculates you should’ve gotten correct, your attempt to be super-strategic in which GMAT topics you studied could end up seriously damaging your score. (For more on the workings of the GMAT algorithm, check out this article on how the GMAT exam is scored.)

Remember, the best way to prepare for the GMAT is to take a comprehensive approach. That way, you’ll be ready for anything that might come your way on test day, and you’ll have the confidence of knowing that you’ve done everything you needed to to reach your GMAT score goal.