Recommended PSAT prep

Test Preparation
1

<p>Hi everyone! I’m going to be a Junior this fall, and I’m very interested in going for National Merit. The index required in my state is 214, and in my practice tests I’m around that number.</p>

<p>My question is: which company makes the best preparation materials? - kaplan, princeton review, or barrons? </p>

<p>The barrons practice test put me at a score of 59 in writing, whereas the kaplan one put me at 79. My scores with the barrons and princeton review put me at around 68 for reading and math, but the barrons was significantly lower. </p>

<p>thanks for your help!</p>

2

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<p>Stay away from all of them. The Official SAT Study Guide is your most valuable resource.</p>

3

<p>^I disagree. I say this is his most valuable resource: <a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/955109-silverturtles-guide-sat-admissions-success.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/sat-preparation/955109-silverturtles-guide-sat-admissions-success.html&lt;/a&gt;. :)</p>

4

<p>thanks for your help! I actually have the blue book, but it’s really difficult for me to understand, and there are no explanations to the missed questions.</p>

5

<p>There are explanations online. The link is in the Blue Book section of the guide.</p>

6

<p>^Yes there are: [Welcome</a> to the Official SAT Study Guide Book Owner’s Area](<a href=“SAT Study Guide – SAT Suite | College Board”>SAT Study Guide – SAT Suite | College Board).
EDIT: Looks like silverturtle beat me to it.</p>

7

<p>Has anyone used Direct Hits for vocab prep for PSAT?</p>

8

<p>^ Yes, Direct Hits is very useful. I’ve only gotten through the first volume so far, but I feel like my vocab has increased dramatically, and my CR score has apparently gone up (I took a previous year’s PSAT at home today and got <em>CR: 66, M: 72, W: 66, Total: 204</em> up from something like 570-640 in CR on another previous SAT and a 59 on my PSAT last year. I don’t think I got many, if any sentence completion questions wrong. I’m pretty sure most of my wrong answers were passage based questions.)</p>

9

<p>Both my sons have used the DH books with great success on the critical reading. We did not know about the books when my older son took the PSAT, but the younger one improved significantly on the PSAT to the semi-finalist level. </p>

<p>To acheive the score you want, you need to get most of the sentence completions correct. There are also a number of vocabulary related questions in the reading passages. One example is the “tone” used by author 1 and author 2 is… For the last 2 years they have loved the word wry as an answer on these type of tone questions in both the PSAT and SAT. It is great you are thinking about this now so you have plenty of time to prepare.</p>