Well, it feels like Christmas morning here at Gregmat headquarters: the new ETS Official Guide has just arrived! We tend to get pretty excited about new books from ETS because 1. we are nerds, and in this case, 2. this book contains new questions, and ETS hasn't published a book with new GRE questions for about a decade.

Should You Buy The New OG?

So the big question is should you buy the book? That's easy: yes, buy this book even if you own the old Official Guide: the very best source of practice material is always ETS, and this book has just under 150 new questions in its new verbal and quant practice sets.

Sidebar: the book claims it has 150 new questions, but I recognized a few questions from the old Official Guide in those sets. Hey - it's ok to fib a little when you're trying to sell some books, am I right? 

What's New In This Version?

Big picture-wise, the 4th edition OG is almost identical to the 3rd edition with one major difference: the two practice tests in the back of the book are shorter to mimic the current length of the GRE. The Argument Essay content is obviously gone. The verbal sections of the book's tests have 15 and 20 questions, so do the quant sections, for a total of 70 questions per test. All those questions are questions that were in the 3rd edition's tests.

This is a bit of a bummer for two reasons: one, the book's tests are not the same number of questions and timing as the GRE you'll take (which has 27 verbal and 27 quant questions), and, compared to the third edition's, this book's tests have a total of 60 fewer questions - and that means 60 fewer questions for you to learn from. Don't throw away that 3rd edition yet!

The book also contains the quant strategies that the most recent edition of the ETS quantitative practice questions book does, which is nice.

But the great thing about the new 4th edition is the new practice sets. The more ETS questions we can solve and analyze, the more we can learn about the test, so the sets are a welcome edition. Here's a quick breakdown:

Verbal Sets

There are 5 verbal sets, each containing 15 questions. There are always 5 text completion questions, and either 5 or 6 reading comprehension questions, either 3 or 4 sentence equivalence questions, and 1 critical reasoning question per set.

Are any of these questions hard? I counted 13 questions that fewer than 40% of people got right. Overall, the questions looked very familiar in terms of style compared to ETS questions I've seen before.

Quantitative Sets

There are 5 quant sets, each containing 15 questions, with the typical mix of topics and balance between quantitative comparison, multiple-choice, numeric entry, and multiple-select.

Are any of these questions hard? Yes, you'll probably be happy to know that I counted 27 questions in the sets that fewer than 40% of people got right, and again, overall, the questions looked very familiar in terms of style compared to ETS questions I've seen before.

Note: in my opinion, nearly all of you should be doing ALL the ETS questions, even the easy ones, to get used to ETS's ways and wording. All the questions in this book have value in that regard.

The Bottom Line

The new 4th edition of the ETS Official Guide is worth your time, even if you already have a previous edition. We buy this book for the new practice questions, and since ETS rarely publishes new material, those are quite valuable.