<p>Are these a waste of time? Are they designed for average or below average students only? Or do they actually help? (<a href=“http://www.highersat.com%5B/url%5D”>http://www.highersat.com</a>)</p>
<p>In short, yes, they’re a waste of time. And certainly not a substitute for learning the math.</p>
<p>The programs might help for a small subset of the SAT math problems, but the group of people who would use the programs properly could almost certainly do the math by hand (faster) anyway. Conversely, people who have poor command of the underlying math would be just as likely to use the wrong tool, or to waste inordinate amounts of time finding the right functionality and entering the data and interpreting the result. A cooler guitar or effects pedal doesn’t make you a better musician (well, this analogy is probably slightly flawed, but you get the idea).</p>
<p>Out of the tens of high/perfect math scorers that I know, few if any rely extensively on calculators. In my experience, calculators are best used for carrying out basic arithmetic (e.g. adding/subtracting/multiplying/dividing) that would be too slow/error-prone to do by hand.</p>
<p>The idea of a calculating solving all your math SAT worries with a cute calculator program is appealing, especially to (as you identified) struggling students, but unfortunately there’s no substitute to knowing the underlying math and being able to carry it out by hand.</p>
<p>-frenetic</p>
<p>Yea the SAT programs are all junk. They may take forever to use and waste crucial time in your test. Math portion is straight forward. Memorize formulas and learn shortcuts. Don’t waste time using that junk.</p>