Do we have to know representative groups and families for chemistry 2 sat? Like in barron there is a whole chapter on it but there is none on the princeton review. I feel it is not on the test but I want to make sure! Thanks
I just looked at that section in my barron’s book. I honestly don’t remember seeing most of the information tested on the sat test. I’d say to just know the basic information covered in the chapter, but not to worry a lot about specifics. I felt like a good portion of the information in the Barron’s book was superfluous. In the sections that were covered by the test, there tended to be a ton of extra information in addition to the content that was actually important. I think this is just the nature of Barron’s, because my “updated” AP Chem Barron’s book contains sections on information that the college board explicitly states is out of the scope of the new exam. It wouldn’t hurt to learn everything in the book, but if you are crunched for time then it certainly is not the most efficient study material, in my opinion. I don’t have any experience with the PR SAT chem, but my experience with PR in general tells me that their books tend to be based around the tests more than Barron’s.
I also remember taking the SAT Barron’s practice tests and feeling like I would do horribly on the test. Come the actual test, I got a 770, which isn’t what the Barron’s tests would have predicted at all. I wasn’t even halfway done AP chem at the time that I took it, so I felt that if I had finished the class first I could have gotten an 800 with no problem. Barron’s doesn’t really give a good representation of what the test looks like. I actually feel that if I had used another book, I could have focused more on what would have actually been on the test rather than worrying about the extra information, and probably could have gotten a higher score because of it, but there is no way to know for sure.
I dislike Barron’s SAT Chemistry. The amount of superfluous information is way too much. All of the content in the book is covered by my syllabus (CIE A Level Chemistry), but it won’t help much in the test, so studying excess material is not the way to go. Things like the Wave Mechanical model and the Aromatic compounds and their derivatives don’t appear on the test. In my opinion, Barron’s is only good for Biology E/M and Mathematics Level 2.
If you have the PR book, study from that only. You will save a huge amount of time and effort. Alternatively, Kaplan is also fine (for the Chemistry test only though, Kaplan isn’t good for other Subject Tests, namely M1/M2).