McGraw Hills practice tests

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
1

Are the McGraw Hills practice tests any good?how accurate are they?

2

They’re not accurate, but they’re pretty well-made. Passages are way too long, some questions are bad, but they’re among the best of the synthetic tests.

3

(that comment is for CR only–they’re not good for W, and I don’t know about M)

4

What about Grubers?

5

Gruber’s is atrocious for Writing and very poor for Reading. I can only assume it’s better for Math, but I don’t know for sure.

6

If you want more tests after the Blue Book, the Red Book of older real tests is good for the areas that haven’t changed too much. Otherwise, Barrons tests are the best synthetic tests IMO, and many of their problems illustrate principles well.

7

How much did you improve by after doing the barrons tests? Because many people say that they are too hard and dont help much…

8

And is the kaplan vocab list good?

9

I am a tutor, so didn’t improve. The Kaplan and McGrawHill tests are pretty close to the real test. I use Barrons and the Red Book with my students. Barrons problems are hard and will not give you a realistic score, but IMO they are good at teaching the skills you need for the test. Also, if you are at 600+, there are advantages to harder than real tests.

10

Oh…okay I’ll do them.Thanks :slight_smile:

11

Is the kaplan vocab list good?

12

And marvin,what’s your score and how many practice tests did it take for you to reach there?

13

(I’m a teacher)

14

Why even consider McGraw Hill or any other non CB tests? Those fake tests don’t really capture what’s really tested nor the repetitive patterns that are pretty obvious on real tests. And the fake tests have typos.

Use real tests. The CB Blue Book has 10 tests. And the CB Online Service has another 9 tests. And you can find another 20-30 CB released tests online.

There are so many real tests out there that there is absolutely no reason to use fake tests.

15

Ummm yeah …that actually does make a lot more sense.Thanks :slight_smile:

16

Yeah, I don’t see much point in doing McGraw-Hill tests. It is nice that there are a lot of real tests for the old SAT. However, if you are already at 700 or so, you can run out of hard problems from real SATs, so I can’t say only use real tests always.