Customer Reviews

Cracking the NEW SAT with Sample Tests on CD-ROM, 2005 Edition (College Test Prep)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Princeton Review challenges the ETS party line on prepping and coaching. By studying patterns in the ETS answer choices and question sequences, Princeton Review came up with what it calls the Joe Blog approach. At its core, Joe Blog says that on easy questions, go for the obvious answer that Joe Blog (a hypothetical Joe-Average) would guess; on the hard ones, avoid the "obvious answers, because they are "tricks" to fool Joe Blog.

If you have a shot at 1350 or above this may not be the ideal approach. But for most other people, it could add some hard-fought points. Even for top scorers, the Joe Blog techniques could add points by increasing the odds of successfully making educated guesses on the toughest questions. Moreover, the Princeton Review writers do provide excellent practice beyond the Joe Blog approach. They seem to have studied the content of the test better than most authors, particularly Barrons. If there is one flaw, it is that the explanations to the practice questions need a lot of work.

While not perfectfor everyone, this book is still an important and helpful resource. I do recommend this book overall.

The Princeton Review prep-book of the New SAT is not worth it! It begins with "the average highschool student, Joe Bloggs." Not only did the book keep refering to Joe, it makes the student reading the book and studying feel like an idiot.

The strategies the book employs are flawed and do not work. They go over every single detail and step, and it got to be really boring. The book spent most of its time explaining the small details, which got super boring really quick. I do not recommend this book, unless one naturally does not test high on the SAT test, then the explaining of every detain might be nice.

If one wants a really good and excellent SAT prep book, check out the Rocket Review by Adam Robinson, which I would say is the best book to prepare for the new-SAT!

This book is great in teaching you the SAT, (teaching how the creators of the SAT think) not teaching what you learn in school, because the SAT is not like school. It DOES go over all the things you will need to know, giving you handy techniques and tricks to use that save time.
However, in, for example, the Math section (where I had trouble), if you are not completely secure in your knowledge of each type of math they show, don't expect to learn anything. There are NO LESSONS. There may be a five-sentence paragraph on quadratic equations and that's as far as they go to refresh your memory.
So unless you know it all and just need a shortcut, I'd buy this book, but pick up some suppliments that delve more into the teaching material you don't know cold. That way you can familiarize yourself with the concepts first, and THEN learn the tricks this book teaches.

So I'd give this book a 5 as far as knowing the SAT, but a 4 since you will probably need additional material

For the record, I have never taken any SAT prep classes. One week before my test, I start cracking this book open. The strategies they teach you, though seemingly simple, are invaluble techniques that you can even use on other tests, because they show you the mind of "test-creators." The practice tests are slightly harder than the normal SAT, but by doing this, they prepare you well. The book is easy to read and understand. I haven't used the CD at all, but I have taken all 3 practice tests that are offered in this book. Though I did question some of the answers in the book, they were very few in number and I do not believe that it affected what I learned from this book. I think that it is important to get to know general ideas of the test: how the test works, what questions will be asked, what answer choices are traps, and knowing what kind of answer is the correct answer.

I scored a 1900 the first time; the second time I scored a 2050.

I recommend you get Princeton's Reviews 11 Practice Tests for the New SAT and PSAT if you want more preparation.

This has got to be the worst SAT prep book I have gone through. The practice tests are riddled with mistakes. Even the online test has mistakes (i.g. Explanation makes sense for the choice that is not the correct one). The strategies are also misleading. If you believe you will ace the SAT with these srategies, you are sadly mistakened. If you follow this book, you will wind up guessing the entire exam. If you are serious about the SAT, avoid this book.

I opened this book up, expecting to find decent strategies that would enable me to crack the new sat. What i got was second-rate and unsubstantiated strategies that the authors of this book so confidently put out with no justification. For example, the book teaches us how to do "topic searches." To do this, you read the blurb, first few sentences of the first paragraph, first sentence of the remaining paragraphs, and the last sentence. Merely this plus referring back to the passage is supposed to let the test taker answer all of the questions asked. If you haven't noticed already, this is the dumbest strategy to ever use for a critical reading section and i believe that those who are faithful to this book would be misled. Much of the book is devoted to "educated guessing" and how an answer can be correctly chosen through signs given by the testmakers, even the math questions. An inane example of this was when i read about how "simple" words are usually correct in the easy portion of the sentence completions while "hard" words are usually correct in the more difficult section of the test. What about the strategy this strategy: "If you're completely clueless, skip it. Hard questions are worth the same amount of points as the easy ones."? The book even uses "Joe Blogg", an imaginary character, devoted to teaching its readers to guess. Yet, the educated guessing strategies only work on the problems that were formed by the author of this book, and is very likely to fail in the real SAT.

My recommendation is to, if you are to buy this book, question every strategy it teaches, but get the most out of the practice tests and verbal/math lessons given in this book. I believe that if i were to blindly follow this book, i would receive retrograde scores.

I do not think it would be fair of me to review this as my son didn't even bother to use it.

Adam Robinson is a genius! Follow his advice and you will ace the SAT, new or old. His latest book is packed with great test taking advice. He helps you work smarter, not longer. My two older sons, now at Amherst and UPenn, used his materials very successfuly and now our high school aged daughter hopes to do the same on the "New" test. This is the ONLY test prep book you should buy!

I had gone through at least three books when preparing for the new SAT. But the kind of tricks and elimination strategies found in this book cannot be found in any other book. The Collegeboard book is good for some practice but this is the book for preparing for it.

very good, helped my sister and her friends a lot. much better than the kaplan one-- full of mistakes.