Customer Reviews

SAT II: Math Level IIC (REA) -- The Best Test Prep for the SAT II (SAT PSAT ACT (College Admission) Prep)

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I've been teaching SAT and SAT II courses professionally for around 5 years, and I can honestly say that this title was one of the least-popular and least-helpful books I have EVER used. The title (or sub-title) of the book states that this is the most comprehensive title available -- that's the problem. It's far TOO comprehensive. It includes lots and lots of information that has never been on the test, and that is very unlikely to appear on the test in the future. (If you learn EVERY word in the dictionary, you're sure to get a good verbal score on the SAT, but there are FAR more effective ways to INTELLIGENTLY improve your vocabulary!) To make matters worse, it seems to have been written BY math lovers FOR math lovers and is nearly incomprehensible to someone who's not a math lover. Hey, if you love math, then you don't need a prep book for the SAT II in the first place! The book has way too much information to absorb, the practice tests are unrealistically difficult, and there's no easy way to use only selected portions of the book (for an abbreviated prep based upon the most important concepts, for example). This book feels like a desk reference for mathematics, not a study guide. In my classes and tutoring, I've found that the books by the big test prep companies (Princeton Review and Kaplan) are concise, accurate, and logically arranged. If forced to choose, I give the Princeton Review title a slight edge above the Kaplan book, but both are excellent titles. I suggest getting both the Princeton Review and the Kaplan titles -- compared to a prep course or college tuition, they're an amazingly inexpensive investment.

How much did I dislike this book? After reading the title, I bought a dozen of them to use with my students -- but after using it for one group of students, I ended up shipping all of the unused copies back.

These criticisms apply to both the Math IC and IIC books -- I don't know about the rest of the books for the other subject tests.

Don't ask me why I bought this book. I didn't take any of the six practice tests. I only looked at the review material. The explanations are difficult to understand. There is a lot of unnecessary information in this book. The real math IIC test is 50% functions. This book will leave you ill prepared for the real test. Furthermore it includes many topics that aren't on the test such as statistics. If you don't want to get a bad score on the SAT II Math IIC test then don't buy this book. I scored a 550 out of 800. I scored in the bottom 10% of all of the other people that took the test. I'm going to retake it, but this time I'm going to use the Barron's study guide.

REA's SAT II Math IIC review book has three essential flaws: it has unrealistic practice tests, an undevloped review section, and numerous typos.
Although the six practice tests included in the book are helpful in providing practice, these tests are completely unrealistic. The questions are not ordered according to difficulty, as they are on the test, thus ruining on opportunity to practice pacing. Many questions are unreasonably time consuming or cover irrevelant topics that won't be tested on (DeMoivre's theorem, for example).
REA claims to include a comprehensive review; this is a half-truth. The review consists mostly of equations, rather than explanations of the subject and approaches to solving problems. Some important topics, namely conic sections, are not covered at all, yet they appear in the book's practice tests!
The answers and explanations for the practice test, which could be considered to be part of the overall review, are completely indecipherable. 33.69xcos=-0.98 is not the same as 5cos(33.69)=-0.98. There is no excuse for such glaring errors.
The six practice tests can hardly be considered reedeming features considering how bad they are. If you want to study for Match Level 2, stick to sparknotes or another review book.

There is so much wrong in this book that it is hard to know where to begin. I think I'll start with a subtle but telling point. On many problems, the answers do not go in ascending or descending order. Real tests, however, almost never put answers out of order. So why don't the folks at REA put their answers in order? I don't know, but if I had to guess (and I do), I'd suppose that the people making the practice questions don't know the real test well or don't care. Either way, the student is doomed.

There are problems galore here. The book features material that is not on the real test. Some of these problems are beyond the scope of the test, and others are too simple in that they require nothing more than a calculator. (For example, one problem in the book asks what 2^(3/4) + 2^(4/3) is. This question, as far as I can tell, has no validity except to test the student's ability to hit the right buttons on his or her calculator and to use parentheses for the power.) The problems do not seem to be placed in any coherent order. The real test proceeds, roughly, in an easy-medium-hard progression. That's certainly not the case here.

Perhaps the worst feature of the book, something it unfortunately shares in common with too many other prep books, is the fact that it has so many factual errors. The idea of a student poring over this book and trying to figure out some of the supposed answers is truly sad. Anyone preparing for the Math 2C test should definitely look elsewhere. This book is horrendous.

After taking all of the practice tests in this book, I can honestly say that this is by far the worst test-prep book I've ever read (and, like most high schoolers, I've read quite a few.) The explanations and the questions are both broader in scope than anything that might be found in the actual test or a math class. The questions are hapazardly thrown in with no regard to difficulty, and the tests themselves seem to have no consistent difficulty levels (I scored 800 on one and barely 700 on another.) One exam, for example, had 2 or 3 questions testing the exact same concept, with slightly different numbers. Though the harder questions might have argueably given me an edge when I do the real SAT II test, they certainly did not merit my purchase.

I have just finished the actual SAT II: MathIIC test. This book definitely helped boost my score higher than what it would have been. The six practice tests in this book are complete and similiar to the questions one might find on the actual exam. You'll get quite a workout from this book. But be warned! The section where it discusses and reviews math topics (i.e. geometry, trig) is limited, and although this book has explainations for every question on all six exams, the explainations can be quite confusing. It took me a while before I understood some of the problems that the book tried to explain.