Customer Reviews

Kaplan New SAT 2005 with CD-ROM

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I am a high school English teacher, working with a colleague who is a great math teacher to create a program on the new SAT I for a very competitive public high school in Oregon. Over the years, we've looked carefully at just about every SAT I book ever published to use with our students. The new Kaplan book is solid, and is far superior to comparable products by the Princeton Review, REA, Barron's and Up Your Score. However, for our purposes we chose "McGraw-Hill's SAT I" over even the Kaplan guide. It provides more and better practice for students than Kaplan, Princeton Review and Barron's, which we have used in the past, and delves into the reasoning skills of the SAT I far more than the others have. The practice tests in McGraw-Hill have the real SAT I "feel" which is enormously important (and lots of them). The main drawback with Kaplan's books, this one included, has been the lack of solid diagnostic practice for students. The McGraw-Hill provides far more of that, in addition to great flash cards that focus on reasoning skills rather than mere memorization. I was impressed with the McGraw-Hill guide's approach to critical reading, writing and vocabulary building, and my colleague has given high marks to the math portion. The Kaplan guide is solid, and I recommend it to many students, but I recommend they try the McGraw-Hill guide first.

The Kaplan 2006 books are out! Don't buy this one, get those (this one is like 8,000th seller and 2006 one is like 100,000th) The 2006 book is just pretty much like this book except there is a TON more practice (about 200 more questions total, not including the extra test) and an extra practice test! Some of that practice is online where there is review, more practice, and MANY practice essays. The grading scale is taken from college board and ALL of the errors are fixed. Why get this book? But I do recomend the 2006 one, it is SUPERB!

I spent more time correcting the material in this book than I did working on the exercises. The amount of typed errors in this book is appalling. One rather tame example: 19+15 does not equal 36, yet the answer key assumes so. In other instances, the typists forgot to superscript the exponents, so one doesn't know whether 2k means 2 times k or 2 raised to the k power. In every single chapter, nearly half of all the given questions had significant typos. I would not recommend this edition to anyone.

However, if you are an aspiring editor for math study books, then this is a must-have.

The Kaplan books for the SAT tend to be the most reliable which is why I bought this book. The book overall does a good job in explaining the new SAT*. The concepts they give you are quite similar to those from the past SAT books so there aren't too many new strategies to help you take on the new questions if you have already read the books for the previous SAT.
The writing section gives a brief overview of what you will see and follws up wif one or two questions after the explanation. Then they give you tactics in how to write an essay along with a few a essay topics for you to try out. Then there is a end of unit excercise which consists of arouund 40 questions. This overall will be helpful to those not familiar with the SAT II writing and will give extra practice to those that need it.
The critical reading section has the same tactics as given from the past books, so nothing special here. THe format is similar to the writing section (explanation, questions, tactics, end of unit test).
The maths section starts off with the basic concepts of the SAT whihc people of the old SAT should be pretty familar with. Then it moves on to talk about the new topics which will be found in the new SAT which is very helpful as they give you an example question after each new topic. Then again there is an end of unit test. There is a bit which talks about questions which trap the test taker which again is helpful as they give you an explanation for the traps they set up and another end of unit test.
The three practice tests at the end are very good and are a like the real thing. BUT they do not have a scaled score chart which isn't that good as people won't know how well they did.
The CD IS A MUST NEED i think as it comes wif two SATS, one PSAT, a diagnostic, a study plan and explanations to the answers u get wrong in the two SATS in the cd. The extra few dollars will be good as the CD is pretty much half of the things kaplan offer for the new SAT.
Overall this book is soild for those that need help for the new SAT. For those that don't feel like wasting money on this book (if they aready bought last year's one or smth) then i suggest you get one of the new thinner ones (SAT: CRITICAL READING, MATHS, WRITING) for your weakest area, as a lot of the strategies in the book are similar to those of last years. THe major weakness i find is not enough practice for maths. They should have more examples for the new topics rather than just one for each so people know the different question types for the topic. They should include approximate scaled score tables to make it better for thsoe that just buy the book and not the cd. I advise those that are definitely taking the new SAT to get it with the cd for more practice

I have mixed feelings about this book. I studied the reading comprehension and essay portions of the book for only the day before the test, and improved almost 100 points from my old SAT score. The essay and critical reading components are fabulous, and I highly recomend them.

However, I have recently started to work in the math section--and have been extremely disappointed. For one, I think their tip of "plugging in numbers" is ineffective and unnecessarily time consuming. So many of their techniques are, frankly, unhelpful. And the most annoying thing--TYPOS. About 45% of the answers are wrong because of careless typing errors on the author's part. It's not only annoying, but distracting. I soon became disgusted and set the book down.

In my opinion this book is not really worth buying. First of all, the book has dozens of typos. Second, the practice on the grammar section is very misleading, especially where the so-called "Answer Explanations" part offers a choice that doesn't make any sense in standard grammatical rules. Last, the materials in this book is not totally relevant to the actual test (in fact it's far from near). Somehow I regret having bought it.

I regret buying the Kaplan guide to the New SATs now that the College Board SATs guide is out. This book was made before anyone even knew what the new SATs were about, so there are some obvious things that are wrong with it. For example, all the math questions are way to easy and were not like any thing like the new PSAT questions (which I took this year). I also found several mistakes with the answer key/reasoning. My advice: buy the new College Board guide instead.

After about a week with this book, I was somewhat disapointed in the amount of practice. But after I did the practice, read the tips, and took the practice tests I began to see my score rise. My writing score (starting at a measly 540) rose all the way to a 680 on the test on the college board website along with an essay score raise of 2 levels! This is a great all around book and I recomend you buy the area is weakest ( in my case critical reading ) and buy the workbook for extra practice, and it is GOOD practice. I recomend this book very much.
The scale, however, is extreemly generous. I recomed you go to the college board website and do percents to figure out your real score (like if I got 32 out of 38, do a proportion to figure out how many I would get out of 49; for the book was published before the real number of questions was released.

kaplan is a really good test prep book and u should get it. this not only comes with the detailed book, but it comes with an awesome cd with lessons, tests, games, and a personalized study plan. I recommend this book to anyone preping for the new SAT.

I found this book to be so helpful because it really explains alot about the new changes and goes into great detail to give you strategies to answer those question. Especially for the new essay, they have lots of sample essays and a good outline to follow when you practice writine yours. I recommend this product to anyone who is trying to take the SAT. It is so easy to use.