A 6 min read

The GMAT Official Guide (OG) 2022 is here, and it comes with a few new enhancements. The Official Guide for GMAT is the most widely used study resource for GMAT preparation and includes retired questions that have appeared in the past on the actual GMAT test. The OG for GMAT is a question bank of more than 1000 questions that have been asked in previous GMAT exams. They are the closest to the real questions asked on the GMAT.

Every year GMAC introduces a new edition of OG. A few questions would probably be going on in your mind about the major enhancements made in Official Guide 2022, how it fares against Official Guide 2021, and whether OG 2022 is worth buying.

To help you make this decision, we compared OG 2022 and OG 2021, and have come up with our conclusion. You can also watch the video where we compare GMAT Official guide 2021 vs. 2022:

GMAT Official Guide 2022 – What’s new?

GMAT OG 2022 has four new additions:

• Two New review chapters, one each for Quant and Verbal 
• Assigned difficulty level for every question 
• Exclusive access to online diagnostic evaluation  
• Enhanced solutions for official questions  

Let us look into each of the above points in detail.  

It takes more than the GMAT official guide to ace the GMAT. No dought the OG is required, but it should not be the only resource you use. Why don’t you try out our free trial that gives you access to more than 400 questions, more than seven webinars conducted by top instructors on GMAT Club, and one free mock test? We are the most reviewed online GMAT Prep company with 2200+ reviews on GMATClub.

Two New review chapters

To help students build their foundational learning, Quant and Verbal review chapters are added to Official guide 2022; this was not available in OG 2021.   

Both the chapters test your conceptual knowledge and consist of 25 practice questions categorized into easy, medium, and hard difficulty levels.    

Here are the number of questions in Math and Verbal review based on the difficulty level of the question:

Chapter	Easy	Medium	Hard
Math Review	11	10	4
Verbal Review	10	8	7

The Quant review chapter includes formulas you should be familiar with, whereas the verbal review chapter helps develop skills that will help you analyze and evaluate written texts and ideas. Here are the topics that are covered under each chapter:

In addition to this, the Quant review also incorporates a quick quantitative reference sheet to review basic formulas and key concepts. This comes in handy as a quick refresher when trying to revise and revisit quant concepts.   

The next addition is difficulty-based segmentation of questions.  

Assigned difficulty level for every question 

While the older versions of the Official Guide presented questions of varying difficulty levels without disclosing what those levels were, the OG 2022 assigns one of "Easy," "Medium," or "Hard" difficulty levels to every single question in the guide. 

This helps test-takers tailor their GMAT preparation by enabling them to select and solve questions of difficulty levels that are aligned with their own degree of preparation.

In total, there are 333 Easy, 307 Medium, and 355 hard questions.  Here is the split for each question type:

Question Type	Easy	Medium	Hard	Total
Problem Solving	99	68	95	262
Data Sufficiency	86	78	76	240
Reading comprehension	41	48	60	149
Sentence correction	52	59	67	178
Critical reasoning	55	54	57	166
Total	333	307	355	995

As you can see, OG 22 has a total of 995 questions, a number which is slightly lower than that in OG 21, which had 998 questions. But, with the addition of two new chapters in Quant and Verbal, OG 22' offers 50 additional questions, bringing the total number of questions to 1045.  Here is a comparison between the question type for GMAT OG 2022 vs. GMAT OG 2021:

Question Type	GMAT OG 2022	GMAT OG 2021
Problem Solving	262	262
Data Sufficiency	240	240
Sentence correction	178	180
Critical reasoning	166	167
Reading Comprehension	149	149
Math Review	25	0
Verbal Review	25	0
Total	1045	998

Please note that there are no "new questions" added to the 2022 guide. The questions have been taken from previous versions of the OG. 

So, the only advantage the new edition of the OG provides is the ability to select, sequence, and solve questions based on difficulty level; however, you would still need to invest considerable manual effort when selecting and sequencing questions to solve. 

Moving on, the next change in Official guide 2022 is a feature in the Online question bank.  

Exclusive access to Online diagnostic evaluation 

The new edition of the OG includes an online diagnostic evaluation for Quant, Verbal, and integrated reasoning; this has 84 questions – of easy, medium, and hard difficulty levels – which have been inherited from older editions of the Official guide but were not included in the 2021 edition.  

Here are the total number of questions in each category:

Online diagnostic evaluation	Quantitative	Verbal	Integrated reasoning
No. Of questions	40	36	8

These diagnostic evaluations help GMAT aspirants assess their preparedness and help them to focus on their weak areas based on performance metrics.  

The diagnostics show you the percentage of correct answers, time taken on each question, the difficulty level of the question, and a detailed explanation about the questions solved.

Finally, the OG 22' includes detailed solutions to the questions in the guide. 

Enhanced solutions and explanations for official questions

The GMAT Official guide 2022 includes more in-depth and comprehensive explanations to help test-takers better understand concepts and the correct processes to leverage when solving official questions.  

Out of the 995 questions, 160 questions have updated answer explanations, and 63 have a new main idea summary:

GMAT OG 2022	Updated answer explanation	New main idea summary
Problem Solving	46	Nil
Data sufficiency	54	Nil
Reading Comprehension	7	63
Critical Reasoning	31	Nil
Sentence correction	22	Nil
Total	160	63

If you look at the two questions presented below, you can see that OG 2022 has detailed answer explanations that can help you tackle questions methodically.

OG 2021

OG 2022

In essence, the explanations for some questions in GMAT OG22' are more detailed. However, given the high quality of explanations available on OG Scholaranium and GMAT Club, some might consider this enhancement a minor upgrade.  

Moreover, no new questions are added to OG 22', and all questions have been inherited from older editions of the official guide.   

But,  

With two new additional chapters in Quant and Verbal and an online diagnostic evaluation that was not available in OG 21', 134 additional questions are available in OG 22'.   

	GMAT OG 21’	GMAT OG 22’
Verbal section	496	493
Quant section	502	502
Math review chapter	Not available	25
Verbal review chapter	Not available	25
Online Diagnostic evaluation	Not available	84
Total	998	1129

So, this brings us to the main question, should you purchase the OG 22?   

GMAT Official Guide 2022 – Should you buy it?

The answer depends. 

If you already have Official Guide 2021, you do not need to buy the latest version. You can access all the questions through Scholaranium and access other diagnostics that provide better insights with e-GMAT's online course.  

However, we recommend purchasing the Official Guide 2022 if you do not own any official guide. The OG 2022 is available at GMAC's official site for $47.99. You can also check other retailers like Amazon and Wiley, which offer the guide at a discount.

GMAT Official Guide 2022 - is it enough to prepare for the GMAT?   

Well, it's not. In our experience, you should use other GMAT Prep materials aside from the GMAT Official Guide. The GMAC also recommends not to depend upon the Official guide completely.   

You can continue your practice by registering for our Free trial that gives you access to more than 400 questions, more than seven webinars conducted by top instructors on GMAT Club, and one free mock test. We are the most reviewed online GMAT Prep company with 2200+ reviews on GMATClub.

GMAT OG 2020 vs. 2021

Take a look at this video on the comparison between GMAT OG 2021 and OG 2020:

FAQ - GMAT OG 2022