Customer Reviews

How to Prepare for the SAT II Chemistry

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i had a chemistry teacher who went over the entire acids&bases unit in a week, and im not a fan of our textbook. My whole review was based on this book, and i got a 800 on the exam. This book does a very thorough job of covering everything(maybe a little bit more) you need to know, and the practice exams are a teeny bit harder than the real test which means u will be very well prepared. I recommend going over this book fully(buy it, mark in it, et cetera), then borrow the princeton review book from the library or something to do the practice tests and skim over the contents because it's a bit more organized. don't bother with the kaplan book. it sucks.

This book, as the title suggests, is an excellent review book for the SAT II Chemistry. I found that other prep book such as Kaplans was completely useless compared to this one. The Barrons book offers many practice tests which are a bit harder than the actual test. I got mostly 780s and 1 800. However on the Kaplans test, I got lower scores (760, 780). Besides the tests, this book explains the experimental section (which many books lack) of the AP Chemistry test very well. It even gives you an organized table of physical properties of commonly tested chemicals. Although the book may look dissapointingly thin, it is a must for all SAT II Chemistry takers. On the real test, I got an 800.

I credit my 800 on SAT Chemistry mostly to this book (partly to McGraw-Hill's). It has an impressive depth of explanation that is easy to follow, and doesn't miss a thing.

This was my primary review book for the chemistry SAT. I read it cover-to-cover and worked through every problem, and I got an 800 on my test.

If you want to do well, do know EVERYTHING in this prep book. I remember there was this one sentence in the last chapter or so about sulfur dioxide and volcanoes. I remember thinking this is random and I don't have the time for this. It actually showed up on my SAT!! So yes, really do know everything in this book.

This book is really good for content review - so buy it for that. There are a good number of practice tests, but I also checked out a princeton review and took the practice test in that.

I am an above average student taking Honors Chemistry. I got this book because I had used the Barron's series of SAT II review books before. The material in this book was good, it has very good explanations, the lab setups were descriptive and overall the explanations were very helpful. Then I moved on to the practice tests. Going through the answers to the practice tests, I made an alarming discovery, some of the answers were blatantly incorrect. The book kept switching endothermic and exothermic reactions on its test answers (for example, they had the graph of the required activation energy for a specific reaction however it was incorrectly labeled as being endothermic when it was really exothermic) For questions 100 - 115 on the test, if statements A and B were true and CE, then there would be no explanation for the answers at all. On occasions, the book said that information on a specific topic could be found on page X but once I got there it was nowhere to be found. There were other, numerous incorrect answers that they said were actually correct.

So overall, the book has very good information and it is a good study aid, but you must make sure that when you take a practice test you actually check the answers that the book provides to make sure that they are correct because on several occasions, the answers they provide are incorrect.

This is a good book except for the fact that it lacks enough practice questions. It provides a very good review but needs more practiºce material.

Barron's has a history of making bad test-prep books, though unarguably, REA is worse. I took the SAT II Biology last year, received an 800, but it was most certainly not the Barron's book that helped. The Barron's book was completely off key in giving difficult enough information, and falsely boosted my confidence in entering the actual test, which was much more difficult than the questions in the Barron's book. In contrast, for the SAT II Chemistry, some of the questions seem unreasonably abstruse and irrelevant (just like REA), providing information that does not help you for the test. Princeton Review has too much of a relaxed tone and misses out on some information as well, and Kaplan also has some unnecessary stuff like (Delta G = -RT ln Keq, some extra electrochemistry stuff), and doesn't have the Henderson-Hasselbalch equation etc. Though a mix of Princeton Review, Kaplan, and Barron's ultimately works. You should definitely stay away from REA though--best to borrow these books from your local library than to buy them.