Hey, good question, mundasingh.
The backstory on the Official Guide for GMAT Review is that it includes retired questions that were once live on GMAT exams.
But the test evolves over time, and the Official Guide doesn't necessarily evolve in parallel. That's especially true because the questions need to be retired in order to appear in the OG, so if today the GMAT is testing a lot more of one thing (say, logical comparisons) and a little less of another (like, in this case, really subtle word differences that are more vocabulary-based), you wouldn't necessarily know that from the OG. And the further back you go in the volumes of the OG, the older the questions are. OG10 was published in early 2003, which means that its questions likely went live in the 1990s. So with the OG10, you're studying a lot of questions that were designed to test students in the pre-internet age, when the GMAT was still taken on paper.
Where you're likely to see the biggest differences in those tests is that in the 1990s the GMAT was predominantly taken in the US, with a huge chunk of the minority coming from Canada and the UK. It was a test for English-speaking Westerners. It's now a global test and it's had to evolve. The math section is becoming more and more conceptual - there's been a rise in Data Sufficiency and Number Properties. And with Sentence Correction the questions have to be fair. In the 1990s you could probably assume that the elite students were well read and had a strong vocabulary with regard to the English language; in 2011 that assumption is much less safe - well-read students could be well-read in German, Arabic, Mandarin. They may be brilliant but not know the difference between "effect" and "affect" (shoot, most Americans don't) or "at a disadvantage" vs. "disadvantaged". So the GMAT has had to adapt and shift its emphases.
So...the point of all that rambling: A lot of questions in OG10 are still very realistic replicas of what you could see today, but some are definitely not. And to a lesser degree you'll find that true of OG11 and then OG12. The more "modern" the questions, the higher the likelihood that they're reflective of what you'll see on the test this year. For the most part the question types and subject matter are the same, but especially for a nonnative speaker don't hold yourself accountable for all the idiomatic and subtle-meaning differences you see in those older questions. I'd much rather that you overlook one item that could have been useful than have you stress details that are irrelevant.
Brian Galvin
GMAT Instructor
Chief Academic Officer
Veritas Prep
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