Customer Reviews

Kaplan 12 Practice Tests for the SAT, 2007 Edition

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I bought this book thinking i would get some good practice..instead when i opened it i thought some questions looked familiar...so i took out the 2006 version of this book and compared the two.....BOTH ARE EXACTLY THE SAME...ALL 12 TEST..ALL THE QUESTIONS...THE ORDER...THE ESSAY...i was supremely angry....So if you have the 2006 version of this book then definitely dont purchase this book....

If you dont have the older version(s) of this book...then buy it if you want some good practice....depite dozens of errors...you will still get some good practice....i just wish that i knew this book would be the exact same as the 2006 version...then i wouldnt have bought it...

As another reviewer noted, this book is largely identical to the previous version. Less acceptable, to my point of view, is the utter failure to correct mistakes that occurred in the previous edition. Number 17 on page 124, for example, is unsolvable as written and the answer is incorrectly reasoned. I e-mailed them about this last year and they agreed that it was unsolveable as written and assured me it would be corrected in the second edition. Well it isn't! Number 12 on page 491 remains uncorrected (in addition to the answer they note, it could also have length of 85 and width of 1). Several other typos HAVE been corrected, for which I am grateful, but one would expect much greater editing accuracy in this edition, given the complete overlap with the first edition.

I am the director of a tutoring program in Boston. Kaplan SATs can be so much easier than the real thing that I sometimes to use them to help my eighth graders prepare for high school entrance exams.

Instead of this book, buy:

1) the College Board book of real, previously administered exams (the so-called Blue Book), then
2) the more recent Princeton Review book of 11 Practice Exams.

The old College Board book, 10 Real SATs, was also great, although it did not include the writing section and the reading section was different. Still, if you are struggling with the Math section or the long Reading passages, I would buy that book even before the Princeton book. And I would buy all of those books before this one.

This book is full of errors. The answer key will state, for example, B as the answer, while the explanation will say the answer is C. The questions are often repeated- for example, the EXACT questions from Test 5 with the EXACT answer choices in the EXACT order will appear on Test 10.

Buy a better book unless you want to go in circles solving the same problem for dozens of pages.

I don't own this book; all I did was look at a random page on amazon. And wouldn't you know it - the second question I saw had a mistake that made it unsolvable. Specifically test 5, section 5, question 13, it read "In constand ~demand as~ a pianist, David ~had never been~ ~more richer~ than ~he is~ now". While the "correct" answer is "more richer", the verb "is" in the end doesn't agree with the "had" earlier in the sentence. Yet in the answer they make no mention of the second mistake.
I remind you this is the second question I looked at. A little probability should tell you how lousy this book is.

The tests in this book are nothing like the real SAT. Don't waste your hard earned money on these and go buy the official SAT study guide with tests made by the ETS.

Even though it may have some inaccuracies, this book serves its purpose in helping to practice the SAT Test.