STEP ONE: BUY BOOKS
The SAT books I use when I’m tutoring are The College Board’s SAT Study Guide 2nd Edition, the Kaplan SAT Math Workbook, and the Kaplan Vocabulary Book. If you know that you are already scoring over 600 on math, then I also suggest you go ahead and purchase “Crush The Test.”
The College Board’s Study Guide, the 2nd Edition, is so poorly edited that someone ought to sue them. is a disgrace, published with a full Errata page for the first few print runs. I’m not sure if they’ve had a second print run and made the necessary corrections. I’ll find out this spring, I’m sure. But it’s not just the errata they’ve caught that are troubling. It’s the errors they didn’t catch that are truly annoying–answer choices that I knew were wrong but I still had to look up in the previous edition to be certain. Also, they dumped one test from the first edition…why? Why not make all the tests they can available? As it is, I take at least one test a year just so I can get my mitts on more material.
Why use it at all? It’s the only source of real, live, actual SATs. They weren’t “spiraled” from SATs. They are “SAT-style”. They are real SATs previously administered and published by the very same doughnut-heads who publish SATs.
The Kaplan Math SAT Workbook is full of problems that are completely unlike real SAT problems, but it is a comprehensive review of the math concepts covered on the test. If you work through the entire thing, you will be sure that you know the math the test wants you to know…and then some. In fact, many of the harder Kaplan Math Workbook problems are much too hard to actually appear on a test. And too straightforward. Remember, the SAT likes to take simple math and make it tricky by asking the question in a strange way. This workbook is an opportunity for cross-training: boxers don’t skip rope because they are going to have to skip rope in a fight. They skip rope because it’s an efficient cardio tool and not as exhausting as sparring. Doing hard straight math is great prep for easy sneaky math.
The Kaplan Vocabulary Book I like because it comes as pre-made flashcards. I don’t like flashcards myself because I lose them. (Or my students lose them.) Lost vocabulary cards become especially annoying because the cards you lost are probably the really hard vocabulary words that you have with you because you couldn’t remember them, and now they’re gone! But I do like the flip-style self-quizzing of learning. You don’t need your mother to drill you over breakfast…
I also have a set of Vocabulary Words with “ridiculous reminders” built into them in the back of my own manual “Secrets from the Vault of an SAT Geek” (c). Email me and I will send them to you gratis. Now go look up gratis!
Crush the Test is an agonizing little book by Mathew Kohler, PhD. It is strictly for high scoring math students and they all of them absolutely hate it. It is a soul searing, crushing prep manual and when you are done working your way through it, SAT math will seem like a cake-walk. The only reason you won’t have a score in the high 700s is because you just got bored because the test was so easy. There will be no difficult problems that you are unprepared for. www.crushthetest.com
Except for Crush the Test, you may purchase all of these books at Community Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn.
SAT Vocabulary Prep Level 1 [Paperback] by Kaplan
Official Study Guide 2nd Edition by the College Board
The Math SAT Workbook by Kaplan
http://communitybookstore.net
7th Avenue between Carroll Street and Garfield Place
