Books for Prep | |
 - Awesome Book for the awesome testThis book actually focuses more on reading and writing than vocabulary. Personally, although there is a new writing section, I like the new SAT better because there are less vocabularies to remember and analogies are always for non-native English speakers. Therefore, I highly recommend buying this because it helps you to prepare for the new SAT. Rating:  - Not So Good as You thinkWhen I first bought this book, I thought I was going to get the best practice ever before every taking the real SAT. However, In Barron's they don't really go in depth in any of the explanations and all/most of the sample problems in both math and verbal sections were very hard to follow.Look out for the math section tactics. Sometimes, they start making assumptions on multiple choice questions( like eliminating one because the answer's too big/small)without giving a certain mathamatical reasoning.The verbal, as I stated before is poorly explained and is difficult to follow(especially the writing section; they don't go in depth in to explaining most the parts of speech and their affect on the other parts of the sentence, hence it was very difficult for me to do the error ID section of the test). What is even more upsetting to me is the fact that Barron's doesn't really provide any face to face/class tutoring so I may never really understand how their strategies really work/how they intended them to work). IN fact, I learned very little from this book and learned a lot more from the Princeton Revew. I was struggling with this book for 2 years. Those books and the course together can really boost up one's score within a few months. Rating:  - Mixed feelingsThe Barron's book has some strengths, which include a good vocabulary section and helpful tactics for high school students to review prior to taking the SAT. It also has some weaknesses. The most significant of these is that the sample tests don't exactly match the format of the actual SAT. As the teacher of an SAT Prep course, I believe that it would be much more beneficial for high school students to take practice tests that duplicate the actual test format in its entirety. Rating:  - IMHO This Is The One Standardized testing should be abolished, but since that's not going to come to pass anytime soon, as a tutor I can tell you, this is the best book I have found to prepare a student for the unmitigated hell that is the SAT. Good luck! Rating: - Terribly different from the new SAT!The practice tests are terrible! I have taken the new SAT in March 2005, and the practice tests in barron are so different from the real new SAT. The real one has 10 sections, but barron has only 7 or 8; the longest sections on the real take 25 minutes, but those of barron can be as long as 30 minutes! My advise is not to buy this book, it is very misleading. I tried Priceton Review's Cracking the New SAT, that one is close to the real SAT, although it is slightly more difficult. By the way, same problem with Peterson's New SAT practice book. In association with Amazon.com | |