Is CBT Listening harder than Paper Based?

[Outdateboy]

Hi everybody, I just finished 5 practice in the ETS TOEFL Preparation kit.

In the final one, which is Practice Test E.
Listening: 8 problems wrong
Structure: 3 problems wrong
Reading: 1 problem wrong

I found my reading and structure are improving all the way from test A to test E. But My listening remain the same. i always got 8 questions wrong.

Today, i start to try the PowerPrep again. I tried it before, I got
Listening: 240
Structure: 190-280
Reading: 250

According to the converting table, the ETS says 240 is quite close to my paper based listening result. I got 8 wrong, which means i would have about 590-600, adnd 590-600 is converted to about 240-250.

I still find the listening in PowerPrep is harder than the tapes from Preparation Kit. The words are just harder to be identified. In addition, the lectures are harder.

Do you guys here feel the same?? What's the problem???

[Erin]

I believe there are many posts about the CBT vs. PBT question.

http://www.TestMagic.com/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=245

Here is some information from http://www.TestMagic.com/toefl/listening/

Why is the listening on the computer TOEFL so difficult?

It is very long and uses hard vocabulary and difficult vocabulary.

On the paper TOEFL, we could raise our scores quickly by learning lots of idioms or certain types of questions that appeared frequently on the test. However, most people now know that the CBT TOEFL is not so easy. The short conversations, the ones that had a lot of idioms and other kinds of questions, appear less frequently on the computer TOEFL than they do on the paper test. On the computer TOEFL, we will have a lot more long talks, the "lectures," which are supposed to simulate what we would hear during a lecture in a class in an American university. These are several minutes long and are very hard for many people to understand. Worse, we are not allowed to take notes while we are listening. Almost everybody agrees: The lectures are the hardest part of the computer TOEFL.

Is it a listening test or a memory test??

Furthermore, since the talks are very long, it's sometimes hard to remember what was said in the beginning. Hey, even I have a hard time remembering, and I'm a native speaker! If you read enough teaching journals, you will realize that many teachers criticize the TOEFL, saying that it's more of a memory test than it is a listening test. TOEFL is aware of this, of course, and claims that a person with an average memory will do well on the test. I disagree. I think too much information is presented in a short time, and most people cannot remember all of the information that might be tested.

No notetaking allowed.

The worst part is that we cannot take notes while we are listening. I think this is ridiculous. The TOEFL is supposed to measure our ability to do well with English in American colleges, and, as we all know, in all American colleges, we are allowed to take notes. Therefore, the test is not really measuring how well we will do in school, it's measuring how well we'll do without a pencil.

Erin

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