Preparation Books
CollegeBoard’s Official SAT Study Guide
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CollegeBoard’s Official SAT Study Guide is, without doubt, the best SAT preparation book on the market. It is made by CollegeBoard, the group that writes the actual SAT questions. Not surprisingly, the book’s 8 Practice Tests are very realistic and similar to the actual exam. This book also has hundreds of pages devoted to explaining the SAT and teaching the concepts needed to master every type of question on the test.
A useful supplement to this book is CollegeBoard’s Official SAT Online Course. While a bit pricier, it provides you with answer explanations to the practice tests in the Official SAT Study Guide (the book) and more official practice tests. Click here to sign up |
Other Good Prep Books
Barron’s How to Prepare for the SAT: 2007-2008Barron's is probably the best prep book for learning the techniques behind doing well on the SAT. It is especially helpful in math, because it is designed to give you tests and practice problems that are harder than most of the ones on the actual SAT. This is extremely beneficial because it teaches you to work out difficult problems quickly, so if you practice with it the CollegeBoard tests will be simple in comparison, and secondly, the problems that most people miss are the medium or hard questions on the real SAT. By taking Barron's SAT sections, you will miss many more problems but this simply means you learn more-- for most people it becomes a waste of time to do even the first ten or so problems of every math section in CollegeBoard, because they are usually very basic, but Barron's starts off as a challenge and continues to get harder, so that by the end you have made many more mistakes and therefore learned much more. And in fact, CollegeBoard does not even offer explanations of problems on the practice tests, while Barron's does.
The "how to do the Math section" portion of Barron's may be the best one available. It is clear and comprehensive and teaches useful techniques that may not be in CollegeBoard. It also provides a lot of helpful practice problems.
Another strength of Barron's is the Writing section. The multiple choice part is fairly straightforward, and Barron's does an extremely thorough job of covering all the rules and then challenging you by making you determine whether uncommon applications of them are correct or not. By the time you have practiced for some time with Barron's writing section, and have read explanations of problems you missed, you will be adept at identifying errors quickly. Also, the "how-to" about the essay is extremely helpful. It goes through the steps of how to write a good essay and has many accurately assessed examples, but perhaps its greatest strength is that it provides you with practice prompts that you can outline responses to and thereby accustom yourself to writing high-scoring essays under pressure.
The reading section is also good. Barron's has a very good vocabulary list that even marks the high-frequency words in case you don't have time to study them all, it also teaches word roots so you can learn to figure out words you've never heard from recognizing their etymologies. However, for the actual passage reading, Barron's is much better than Princeton Review, but CollegeBoard might be the best choice for most of your critical reading practice, simply because it's good to accustom yourself to CollegeBoard's style of questioning on the reading section.
Overall
Overall, Barron's and CollegeBoard are good supplements-- Barron's teaches you the theory behind the harder problems (so it may not be the best choice if you are not aiming for a very high score), but CollegeBoard is by far the most realistic. Make sure to take at least one or two Barron's practice tests during the course of your studying, to get a feel for the harder questions. When your next test is CollegeBoard you will be amazed at how much simpler it seems--a very satisfying feeling.Books to be cautious with
Princeton Review (any edition)While the Princeton Review SAT preparation books are okay as a study resource, they do have many shortcomings. The test questions are often badly written. Many are worded ambiguously or do not have logically correct answers. Additionally, the book is fraught with errors.
Building Vocabulary
There are a number of vocabulary based questions on the SAT so becoming familiar with high level vocabulary is critical. We recommend a vocabulary list such as those found in the Barron’s SAT preparation books. The best way to learn vocabulary is not to memorize 10,000 word lists; it is to read extensively and gradually accumulate vocabulary.
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