orange41

Some people say barrons overprepares you, but that you end up doing well on the act because of it. I also heard the math/science were particularly good sections.

run far far away, or use it?

I am already using the red book, kaplan, and princeton.

viciouspoultry

horrible, they test you on concepts for math you will never see on the test. The English also has a lot of unneeded concepts and reading is way harder than the real thing. I never looked in their science though.

bluebayou

^^disagree. I liked Barrons the best for math & science. To score very high, you need to get nearly every question correct, so practicing a math concept that occurs every few years is one more correct answer.

Peytoncline

Barron's math and english are notoriously hard... its math sections have some unecessary stuff in them, but on the stuff you do need to know, barron's does a pretty good job on that

for english, it's really in-depth and really hard... lots of nick-picky concepts on there... it'll make the real act english seem like a joke

so, i like barron's.

IWA1409

Honestly for the ACT I think Barron's is a waste. I looked over a Princeton Review book and found the questions fairly easy, and after taking the test fairly accurate representations. The Barron's book however was discouragingly hard, I took the English section and missed about 13 questions, on the ACT the following day I got a 35 on English. In my opinion Barron's is overkill and can actually be harmful, go for Princeton Review.

JDHarms

I'm the same way. It's always much better for me to prep on material as close the actual level of difficulty as possible. I've tried harder stuff, but instead of "overprepping" me, it just discourages me.

Of course, I find that I score better on days I am confidant than days after I've prepped a lot. And the two don't always match. I plan on sticking with stuff fairly close to the real thing. That's just me, though.

BALLER1234

barron's math has SO many math concepts that aren't on the ACT's at all

TTwhite

I've heard Kaplan's book is good. There should be a sticky or something about ACT books. So barrons (like usual) is overkill, PR sounds good, and i've heard Kaplan is good. Official ACT guide a must, too, for practice tests (just like blue book) I guess?