1600 on your SAT? Hey, it could happen...
Written: Jun 14 '03
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Product Rating:
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Pros: good overview of verbal/math; 10 real SATs; written by College Board themselves
Cons: No vocabulary
The Bottom Line: This book sure seems like a winner (although I won't really know 'til I get my scores back
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| mrb129's Full Review: 10 Real Sats 3ed Books |
I purchased "10 REAL SAT's" as part of a SAT prep course I am taking at my school this summer. Let's face it, the SAT isn't exactly a subject that people are going to want to read many books on - there are only so many tips to help you boost your score. Once you know the tips, the only way you can get better is to apply them and take practice tests. Lots of practice tests. That is what went on in the minds of the writers of "10 REAL SAT's." And they should know; the book came from the same people who write the actual test itself.
"10 REAL SAT's" has 17 chapters, but this high number is deceiving; some of them are as short as just four pages long. They cover the basic strategies needed to tackle the questions on the SAT, and range everywhere from timing tips to calculation questions. While the book can't - and doesn't try to - reteach you algebra and geometry or double your vocabulary, it, on the other hand, addresses the strategies behind how to answer the problems. These chapters are informative but don't really contain any added information you wouldn't find elsewhere; the fact that it comes from the College Board doesn't, in actuality, give "10 REAL SAT's" a huge edge over other prep books.
The verbal section of the SAT has 3 sections (although this is due to change starting in March 2005): Sentence Completions, Analogies, and Critical Reading. "10 REAL SAT's" offers tips, sample questions, and explanations for all 3 of these components to the verbal half of the test. I think the authors did an effective job of introducing tips for these categories; they were informative but not necessarily confusing or weighty. Because it's harder to improve a mathematically-inclined student in the verbal area than vice versa, there's only so much you can do to help people learn to tackle the verbal. It's mainly just a vocabulary test when it's all said and done.
For analogies and sentence completions, the book briefly breaks down each of these concepts and helps the reader work through problems where unknown vocabulary would have posed a problem. For instance, they advise readers to "look for analogous relationships between pairs of words, not words that have similar meanings." Also, it tells test-takers to eliminate unrelated words right off the bat. The sentence completion and analogy questions are ordered according to difficulty; if you are stuck on a question in the beginning of the section, the problem is supposedly easier so the right answer will be an easier word. The same apparently works for hard problems; they have hard answers.
For critical reading, the book advises you to read the questions first so you have an idea of what you are looking for; after all, "the information information you need to answer each question is in the passage(s)." According to "10 REAL SAT's", there are vocabulary questions, logic-style-tone questions, inference-assumption-implication questions, and fact questions. I also liked the KEY WORDS AND PHRASES chart included in the book that breaks down common phrases and words used in the reading passage questions and what they really mean, like "according to the author," which can be translated to "the statements, assumptions, or inference that the author is making, even if you disagree with what the author has stated. The question is designed to see if you understand what the author has written."
One major problem I have with the verbal section of "10 REAL SAT's" is the omission of a vocabulary bank. These are the people who write the SAT; you'd think they'd know what kind of words are included on the test! There is a short "Building Vocabulary Skills" page with tips on how to boost your word bank, but the suggestions are either broad or almost irrelevant, ranging from "when you look up a word in the dictionary, pay attention to the different definitions and the contexts in which each is appropriate" to "play Scrabble or Boggle." I think a list of commonly-used SAT words and a roots, prefixes, and suffixes chart would have added a lot to "10 REAL SAT's."
On the mathematics half of the SAT, algebra, arithmetic, and geometry questions are scattered among three different types of questions: 5-choice multiple choice questions, quantitative comparion questions (where the problem presents 2 columns and the test-taker must evaluate if column A is greater, B is greater, if A=B or if there is not enough information to decide), and student-produced response questions (no answer choices).
2 of the easiest ways to solve math problems on the SAT are to substitute numbers and to plug in answer choices for a variable. "If the choices are numbers, they are listed in order from lowest to highest," "10 REAL SAT's" notes. "So if C turns out to be too high, you don't have to try out the larger numbers and if C is too low, you don't have to try out the smaller numbers. The book does a good job of listing out various important concepts from Arithmetic, Algebra, and Geometry (along with other topics like Probability and Data Interpretation) that will (and will NOT) be needed on the SAT. Again, like the verbal sections, there are a plethora of sample questions and explanations along with "Recap" tips at the end of each chapter that list the College Board's official advice for the math sections.
One added plus to "10 REAL SAT's" is its section specifically designed to help students prepare for the PSAT/NMSQT. This test is like the real SAT in that it contains both a verbal and a math section, but the PSAT also has an added "writing skills" part. Where many SAT prep books forget to include this Writing Skills section in their books, but "10 REAL SAT's" includes - and effectively so - various tips to tackle the Writing 1/3 of the PSAT. This material is presented similarly to the math and verbal earlier, with sample questions, explanations and answers, and tips along the way. The PSAT writing skills section is divided into 3 components: Identifying Sentence Errors, Improving Sentences, and Improving Paragraphs.
So this book sounds good so far, yes? Well I've only discussed 272 of the review's 685 pages, and after all, it wouldn't be called "10 REAL SAT's" for nothing. The rest of the book is 10 complete, real SAT's with answer keys. The date of the test is included along with an easy-to-understand guideline for scoring each one. "Each edition of the SAT [in "10 REAL SAT's"] includes only 6 of the 7 sections that the test contains. The equating sections have been omitted becasue they contain questions that may be used in future editions of the SAT and do not count toward your score." The 10 real SAT's look just like the real deal and even contain grid sheets so you can practice bubbling in your answer.
As useful as I have found this book to be so far in my SAT and PSAT review, it's hard for me to recommend this book so categorically until I actually take the test and get my scores back, which won't be until January 2004. But after reading the book and taking my 1st practice test my score was a 1460 (800 math 660 verbal). I'll let you know in a few months how the the actual thing turned out, but until then, I've got to keep studying. Bottom line: Just buy the book. It's easier than a pricey prep course; they tell you the same stuff and for about $1000 less. (I would know; I'm enrolled in one of them now.)
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
mrb129
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Member: Molly
Location: Dallas, TX
Reviews written: 130
Trusted by: 59 members
About Me:
I will be gone July 6-August 10; have a good summer all!
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