IMO the problems in each section of the math tips are awesome. I teach the math tips from this book to my tutees. I know some people say only do real problems, but these are excellent illustrative problems or areas you need to know.
No. Barrons review materials are almost always more difficult than the actual test, and they cover topics that are useless for the SAT 1.
A student at 700 can get about 85% of these problems right. If they were not fairly hard problems, they would be sort of useless.
The problems are designed to illustrate specific topics on the exam. I am not clear why those topics are useless.
Since I have frequently argued against the use of non-college board material, I want to clear up one point: I was talking about students who were working on their own. If you are working with a tutor, then these materials can be of value. A tutor will help you to see what is and is not relevant and will keep you (hopefully) from wasting time on any question that happens to be irrelevant or flawed. And it is certainly helpful to have concise reviews of the math that is covered on the test. But there is only so much time that a student has to invest here. The majority of that time should be spent on authentic material. That goes double, triple, more for reading and writing. It is painful to see how much time is spent here debating finer points of questions that would NEVER be on the SAT. A tutor can help you avoid those. OR you can just stick with the blue book.
I agree that real SATs are way better than Princeton Review, Kaplan or whatever books of problems. I do see use specific illustrative problems, such as those with the tips in Barrons SAT and Chungs.
Aren’t the problems on real CB tests pretty illustrative of what has been on real CB tests?
IMO the Barrons problems in the tips are better at focusing on the type of problems on the test than real problems. They are also arranged by category.
I partly agree with the real problems orientation in this forum. However, IMO there are exceptions, such as illustrative problems of SAT concepts, if you are a top scorer and want more hard problems, or if you have done all the real problems of appropriate difficulty level.
There won’t be better tests than those made by CB. That’s the material that students must study, IMO.
agreed. the real cb tests are the best because they’re literally just different forms of the actual SAT. they are reflective in every way of the difficulty, topics, and types of questions on the real SAT.
I agree with pckeller, but would push the envelope a bit further. First of all, it requires for the tutor to fully understand why the wannabe tests are NOT necessarily relevant to the SAT, and be able to fully master the contents. I am afraid that I am not so sure about that part – based on some of the comments read in the past decade here.
That does NOT change anything to the conclusion that one should rely on SAT official tests and ONLY refer to those “source books” for illustration purposes. In a way, it is helpful for a tutor to use the PR or Barron’s books and show what one should NOT do. There are merits to look for different approaches, and discuss why some are better than others.
Finally, if there are questions about the continuing relevance of the White, Red, or Blue Books, the same cannot be said about the released QAS. Hard to argue that those are … real tests!
I agree that it depends. I think that a tutor working to prepare a student for multiple tests (think AP, Subject Tests, or even that ACT one, to dig into “harder” material. When the discussion is confined to the PSAT and SAT, there is zero value in spending time on problems that exceed the scope of the test, and especially not with some of the garbage books that shine with poor editing and irrelevance.
I use mainly real problems in tutoring. However, obviously, I am not as strong on real problems as some posters here. There are some issues with real problems. They aren’t arranged by subject. Some students are used to studying one thing at a time in school. Also, if you are self studying, the Blue Book doesn’t include solutions, although you can find them on Youtube.
Barrons SAT has better material teaching the type of problems on the SAT than the BB. The illustrative problems of each tip are helpful in teaching material students need to know.
With a student looking to get 750-800 on the math SAT, I fairly quickly run out of difficult problems in the BB. Now I use the Red Book and White Book. Some of the problems in those books are in formats no longer used. Also, they tend to be trickier but use less advanced math than the current test. That can be useful, but there are tradeoffs of using made up problems versus real problems from a different test.
You don’t want to use problems that cover material not on the test. However, if some one is getting like 4 problems wrong in math on practice tests, I give that student lots of hard problems, so books with harder than average real problems are useful.
For the writing section, I often give students just the hardest problems to do, so we finish all the relevant problems in the BB fairly quickly. The Red Book doesn’t have writing problems, so I have to use other materials.
Also, here is something useful (among the many useful things) from Stacey Howe-Lott’s website:
Another thing that you can do if you are amenable to using Mike’s PWN book is have students do specific chapters (say percents or ratios) and then have them follow that up by using the index that he provides at the end of each chapter to locate the questions in the BB that fall in that category (and he has their level of difficulty listed too so a person can target questions at the appropriate level of difficulty). Even if a person has gone through a lot of the BB they can just buy another copy of it and start fresh with the Math questions - rarely will someone really remember many of the questions.
The only thing is that his book really works better for someone at the upper end of the spectrum and is not as useful for people struggling with Math.
To some extent, PWN the SAT assumes students have most of the the basic math knowledge to do well on the SAT and the book teaches students how to take the test, decipher questions, understand patterns, etc. For students who don’t have sufficient math skills for the test, there are many other sources that can be used in supplement or perhaps before starting PWN.
Definitely. Agree 100%.
Don’t you guys think Dr Steve’s advice to study for the SAT at least 3 months prior too much? I thought something that would not exceed a hundred hours is more than enough.
I think that could be enough time to increase your score. It’s not the time you study but how you study. Obviously, you will need time to study, but you need to try until you get the score you want. It will require hard work.
What’s your score?
How much will you like to increase?