Official thread on sat prep books!!!!!!!!!

immortalix
Fri, 17 Jul 2009 20:40:38 +0000

My opinion of each resource in order of helpfulness:

College Board Official SAT Study Guide (BB, BB2) - Must Get. The only reliable source of practice tests out there, enough said.

Direct Hits Core Vocabulary & Toughest Vocabulary - Get if you need to improve CR. This word list has the highest frequency of SAT words occurring on official SATs.

Rocket Review - Get as a general study guide (good Writing & CR). It is written by a Princeton Review co-founder and reflects his current thoughts about the SAT.

Barron’s 2400 - I have mixed opinions about this book. The book cuts to the chase and goes over every type of writing problem pretty well. The reading strategies are helpful. The practice problems are absolutely ridiculous though, not at all similar to actual SAT questions. Sometimes even after reading the answer explanation for the hard problems, I still have my doubts about the answer.

Princeton Review - A general study guide. The Joe Bloggs method is a bit outdated. Go with Rocket Review instead. If you do get this book, don’t get the DVD version (the DVD is garbage).

Barron’s - A general study guide. Horrid book IMO. The font is small, the language is boring, and the book was first published in 1954. My hunch is that it hasn’t been updated too much since the 1950s. The vocabulary list in this book may be helpful if you are just looking to learn vocabulary in general, and not necessarily for the SAT.

Barron’s Workbooks - published a long time ago also. I only used the CR book, and the sentence completions continually use the same set of vocabulary words, so it wasn’t really that helpful.

Kaplan SAT Classroom Course books - complete waste of money. The strategies are not helpful. The whole course pretty much tells you what type of problems show up on the test and doesn’t necessarily give you solid strategies to tackle the questions. Practice tests are helpful.

Note about Test Prep Classes:
Test prep companies pretty much preach the same stuff that they do in their published books. Save yourself and your family ~$1000 by buying the PR or the Kaplan prep book. The course pretty much reiterates the same material through an instructor. The reason test prep works is because they generally have 4 practice tests. It is the practice tests that get you the most improvement and not the lessons they teach you. You can do practice tests on your own using BB or BB2. If you seriously have a problem focusing, then maybe shelling out $1000 is the way to go.

Ivy Insider has a pretty allure because the instructors are Ivy League students who scored above 2250 on the SAT, but this doesn’t mean they are good instructors. Even then, they are following the company’s structured lessons, so they aren’t really inputting their own heuristics for solving problems.