The three classic booklets, Coloured, Standard and Advanced, are sold by Pearson as clinical and educational tests. If your invitation comes from an employer, the odds are you will not meet a booklet at all. Three products carry the Raven’s name into hiring, and it is worth knowing which one you are likely to sit before you spend an evening on the wrong shape.
Raven’s Adaptive
Pearson TalentLens’s hiring product. Fifteen items in about twelve minutes, untimed and unsupervised, computer adaptive from an item of average difficulty, eight options on a 3x3 design, a score converted to a percentile, seventeen languages. Adaptive means the second item depends on your first answer and so on, so a strong candidate meets the hard end quickly. The items are the APM’s shape: every lesson in the APM course applies, and the SPM course’s Sets C to E do.
Raven’s 2
The 2018 revision of the classic test, with digital forms drawn from an item bank so that each person is given a unique item set. Pearson publishes no per-form count or time limit. It keeps the classic shapes, so the set-by-set lessons in the SPM course are the closest preparation.
The APM inside Korn Ferry
Korn Ferry licenses the Advanced Progressive Matrices itself into its assessment battery, as the language-free reasoning measure. If Korn Ferry sends the invitation, the APM course is the one to take, Set II included.
What that means for you
- Employer invitation, no publisher named: prepare for the APM's shape (3x3, eight options) and expect an adaptive draw and a short clock.
- A school, a clinic or a research study: expect a classic booklet, untimed, and the set structure this course teaches.
- Any Raven's: the missing piece is bottom right, the options sit below, and the difficulty rises through the sitting. That never changes.
Sources: Pearson TalentLens, Raven’s Adaptive product page; Yang et al. 2023 on Raven’s 2; Korn Ferry’s own description of its battery. Read 2026-09-21. Pearson publishes no per-form counts for Raven’s 2.