anybody taken retired paper gmat (test code 14) from ets?

thanks a lot for your replies! I actually haven't taken PP yet, this was my first practice test. I was surprised at how little time I had, but I suppose that's one thing to get used to for the real exam.

i was just wondering if the hard questions in that paper exam compare at all to the kind of hard questions that you can get on the cat exam.

paz

There is more time per question on the CAT than on the Paper exam: 2 mins per math question and 1:50 per verbal.

I can't say anything about the difficulty of the paper vs. CAT - I have not taken the Paper version.

I took the paper exam in January '97 (670 - 94th percentile at the time), went to law school instead, and have recently started to prepare for the test again. So far, my preparation has consisted of the Kaplan 800 book and one PowerPrep test.

From what I have seen, I do not believe the difficult CAT questions are any more difficult than those found on the old paper test. However, the test does seem more difficult overall because these hard questions appear much more frequently. If you do well from the beginning on the CAT, you won't see the easy questions that you would have seen in the old version.

I would further note that, although the test seems to be getting more difficult, the scores seem to be more forgiving. A 92 percentile in the Verbal section and an 87th percentile in the Quantitative section only landed me a 670 back in the day. From what others have posted on this site, it seems like this same combination of percentiles would receive 700+ by today's standards.

-- Mike