Customer Reviews

Cracking the SAT, 2012 Edition (College Test Preparation)

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The Princeton Review has finally achieved a remarkable goal: A radically new cover design around zero changes from last year's text!

Since 2005 when they revamped their textbook for the new SAT, they have annually produced a new edition. Every year a shiny new cover with a new student of different ethnicity. And every year they managed to adjust the layout a wee bit: change a word or two here or there, but keep essentially the EXACT SAME TEXT from year to year! As a test prep tutor who uses this otherwise helpful book for her students, it is infuriating to be forced to buy a new book every year - rewriting all my notes - just to match the new page numbers.

In 2010, they added another practice test into the book, the only real, if small, improvement, since the rest of the text either stayed the same or lost some of its punch. It is well known that as one edits something repeatedly, it tends to lose energy, as any student working on his or her college application essay is aware. This certainly happened to The Princeton Review SAT text: The Critical Reading section in particular lost a lot when they chose, in 2007, to merge the Long and Short Reading Passages techniques, resulting in a confused and less effective approach to these passage types which require very different techniques and focus.

But this year -or rather, next year, since the 2012 model arrives with almost a half year to go- they gave up all pretense at creating new value. Shamelessly, they radically changed the cover to a dull black and white with a single student smiling in the void. (At least I'll be able to differentiate it from the army of their 2005-2011 editions on my bookshelves!) But the interior of the book is absolutely identical to 2011! I have compared the two texts side by side and flipped at random to dozens of pages in both books and they are the same, totally.

So, pick up a good second-hand copy of 2011 or 2010 if you like and save some money. The Princeton Review is a good course and their basic test-beating techniques are definitely helpful. This text in conjunction with the SAT 'bible' ("The CollegeBoard's Official Guide to the SAT") used for its practice tests, accompanied by "Tutor Ted's SAT Solutions Manual" are the best study trio I have found. For students seeking extra math help, Barrons dedicated "SAT Math Workbook" is terrific, as is the collection of free lessons and CollegeBoard math questions explanations available for free online at Khan Academy.

The Princeton Review is a great book for what it aims to do: provide you with a decent score on the SAT's. It does not, however, prepare you to do exceptionally well on the SAT's (and by that I mean 750+ in any given section). Basically, if your goal is to break 650 or maybe hit a 700, this book is perfect, and I am sure that if you use it properly, you might be able to nail a 700 in every section.

The Math prep is not at all comprehensive or in depth. They do a nice job of laying out basic concepts, but for the most part the strategies are poor. They have this thing called the "Joe Bloggs technique," which essentially says something to the effect of, "on easy questions the tempting answers are usually right, on medium questions the tempting answers are rarely right, and on hard questions the tempting answers are never right." They aggrandize this method beyond its actual ability, which isn't much from the start. They do have very useful techniques for percentages, ratios, and averages, but they never explain strategies to help you with the harder questions.

Critical Reading was their strongest section, between the Princeton Review methodology for passage analysis and their vocabulary list. However, there were slight drawbacks, namely the method they use for passage analysis is slightly hard to swallow at first. Once you get used to it, it becomes much simpler; however the first time you read through it and apply it, it may seem ineffective. The vocabulary section was very good, but if you want a higher score, you may need vocabulary supplements.

The Writing Section was abysmal. The review of grammatical concepts was nonexistent and the strategies for writing the Essays weren't really flushed out, and as a result you do not get a sense of what the essays are like or how to write one.

So again, if your aiming for a 650-700, this book will do the job. If you want to snag a higher score, I'd look somewhere els. I'd recommend looking as SliverTurtle's guide (just google it) if you intend to reach or break a 2100. He (or she; I have no idea who wrote it) talks about everything you may need for a high score on the SAT's.


Oh and good luck!

As a tutor, I'm very selective about the SAT books I use with my students. When one student recently completed all the practice tests in the College Board's SAT book (the only book I ever recommend), I resorted to the Princeton Review. I was deeply disappointed with the critical reading questions; they were too easy and sometimes the wording was inaccurate (e.g. asking what was implied in a passage when the answer was explicitly stated). My student, a high school senior who has taken many advanced and AP classes, also noticed the inferiority of the content in this book. I won't be using it again and will be recycling my copy.

I love this book to death. It gives you SAT-specific tools and techniques for knowing which questions are worth answering, figuring out tricky questions, setting goals, and much more, all in a fun and easy-to-read format. If you are thinking about buying this book, you might want to keep these things in mind (I was a bit surprised when I got my book and started reading!):

- This book is huge (768 big pages). However, it is by no means difficult reading -- I got to page 150 in about a day! However, it weighs kind of a lot if you are planning on carrying it around.
- This book uses a very non-traditional approach. Rather than just teaching you grammar, math, or writing, it teaches you how to use the process of elimination, or POE, and a principle that they call the Joe Bloggs principle, which states that hard questions can't have an obvious answer (the answer that your average student, Joe Bloggs, would chose).
- Don't worry if you've done poorly on the SAT before -- this book will teach you what you need to know! It turns out that on the SAT you don't really need to know too much about grammar. The book give gives you a huge "hit parade" of words for the SAT, so vocabulary is covered, and the math section begins by teaching you the very basics.
- This book is written in a very palatable style. The authors of this book knew their audience -- high school students. Because of this, you feel like you're speaking with someone you know. It uses plenty of colloquial speech, and practically anyone with a brain could follow along with only a little bit of effort.

This book is definitely worth the money, and I would be lost studying for the SAT without it!

I used this book when I was in high school, and recently bought it for a friend's daughter. Flipping through it, I found references to old friends like Joe Bloggs, as well as very helpful explanations.

While for GMAT review, I think Kaplan is better, there's no doubt for me that Princeton Review is the gold standard for SAT prep!

As is obvious in the title, this textbook is poorly edited. One of my major gripes with this book is that after each practice test, there is a table of answers for all sections for convenient checking and then there are the answer explanations for each section afterwards. For some reason, the letter answers given in the table are sometimes in fact NOT the right answer, though the answer explanation in the back will have the correct letter answer. Example: "A" is listed as the correct answer for Problem 2, Section 2, but be "B" will be the true answer as given in the answer explanation. Or another example: the answer given to the left of the explanation differs from the actual answer justified in the explanation. Example: A is listed in bold, but the answer justified is B.

How hard is it to make sure that the answer "A" is present for a grand total of 4 times? Once in the problem, once in the table, another to the left of the explanation, and then in the explanation itself/

Besides this disconcerting problem, there is also the matter that the problems themselves are poorly edited. In the math section for example, the following problem (number 12) is presented on page 569:

If f(x) = 4x-8 and g(x) = 3x^2 +7, then g(f(3)) = ?
A)9
B)19
C)27
D)68
E)76

The answer to g(f(3)) is 55 and I was quite disconcerted...until I saw that the answer explanation had f(g(3)) = ? with the absolutely hilarious transition: g(3) = 3(3^2) +7 = 27- 8 =19. I know right?

Unfortunately, my weakness in the SAT lies in the reading and writing section; thus, I am unable to find as many editing problems here. But there are mispelled words, etc. The likes of which you would expect SpellChecker to have caught.

Admittedly, this is a big book of about 900 pages in total. Some errors are expected and perhaps I am being unreasonable in my expectations of quality editing and proofchecking. But the above errors listed are of the umpteenth, and I got so frustrated that I just had to write this review.

So far, I love the way that this book step by step guides you on picking a right question. I'm only about 100 pages through, and I've gotton sample questions but when answering and when the question is provided, it doesn't really give you a great explanation.
Anyways, I do really recommend this book. I'm looking forward to take my SAT in spring :x

This is decent resource to prepare for the SAT. It is written in a very approachable, straight forward tone. However, it is not the best SAT preparation book. This book targets a specific kind of students. If you are a student that is not really interested in having a great score, but you want to do your best without spending too much time studying for the SAT, this book is for you. This book will teach strategies to approach to the different kind of questions that you will encounter in the test.

As any SAT preparatory book, It starts giving you a review of the SAT topics. The reviews are very week, specially in the writing section, with the exception of the reading section, which I find very compelling; if have been out of school or if you want to review the topics, I would not recommend this book, I think Gruber's and Barron's offer a more extensive review of the topics. It has 4 practice test and 1 online. The online resources are not very good. The practice test are very difficult, some math problems require a lot of time. They differ a lot from the real test. but I think they would prepare you well, especially in the reading section.

Bottom line: It is an average-to-good quality book. It has good techniques, and it teaches how to give the best estimation of an answer. But, I think the best way to master the SAT is taking as many practice tests as you can and develop your own strategies that would fit better to your specific abilities.

I purchased this for my daughter who is in high school hoping she would do a few questions each night. She actually is using this book and says that she thinks it is helpful. Hopefully she will do well on her SAT.

Practice test 4 section 6 is undeniably a math section, it starts on p256 and the first question is about the number of books on shelved.
However, in the scoring guide, section 6 is a reading section... Weird, right?
Even weirder, I got the same answers for section 6 as the ones listed in the answer key.
This is really problematic because this means that practice test 4 had 4 math sections, sections 2, 5, 6, 9 --- none of which are the experimental
What's more, this also means that there are 3 reading sections, sections 3, 7, 8 --- section 7 is the ungraded experimental according to the book.

Practice test 4 is virtually unable to be graded because of this error.
Additionally, according to the incorrect answer key, the three math sections have a total of 52 questions.... Yet on the scaling chart it is possible to get a raw score of 54....

Just wasted 4.5 hrs of my life.