<p>how many pages does G-ix have? Is there any practice test in it?</p>
<p>LOL girlfriendmb! And thanks guys for the recommendations. :-)</p>
<p>just got the monster 700 page rocketreview -- i'll let you guys know how it turns out...</p>
<p>I really need to get a good score on math. Would barron's work for me?
I just finished Kaplan math workbook. I thought it was pretty helpful.
But some people say it is easy compared to the real SATs.
Does anyone know what is the best math workbook for the new SAT?</p>
<p>Guys do you think this grammatix course works or is it a scam, I really don't know a lot about it but, it does gurantee you a lot of improvement. Guys if any of you have taken the couse and improved you sat scores can you please list you sat score and the improvement by taking the course</p>
<p>Check out the site and see for your self </p>
<p><a href="http://www.acethesat.com/%5B/url%5D">http://www.acethesat.com/</a></p>
<p>search threads before you post this question.</p>
<p>thanks for the help!!!!!!!</p>
<p>sure it wouldn't hurt to go through the barron's math workbook. it drills stuff into your head. the best thing to do is take the tests from the blue book and get used to the question types.</p>
<p>Godot~</p>
<p>I understand why you may be unable to divulge certain part of the Grammatix book. However, I believe that discussing factual errors of the book would be most helpful for everyone, including Mike barrett. If you want to protect the copyrighted material, I believe you could make some references to the page numbers where the errors are. This way the owners of the book could see it for themselves. So feel free to simply post a mesage such as: "See page 202, third paragraph - This is wrong because ...."
I agree that it will be easier for me to point out the errors in Robinson's book. However, the fact that RR contains 700 pages is of little relevance. It was the decision of the author to release the manuscript before subjecting it to a complete review. After all, Adam Robinson, with his Princeton Review is far from being an amateur and should know how to lean on his editors. There are two types of errors: small typos and errors in judgment. I am particularly unforgiving when Adam Robinson tries to make a point and does not check the accuracy of his statement. For instance, his lack of understanding of the words economic and economical is a poor reflection on his overall knowledge. It is also hard to consider a little lapsus linguae when he discussed the same example on national television. </p>
<p>As my several thousand posts in the SAT forum can attest, my only interest is to help other members. If my comments were wrong, I'll be glad to retract them. I am also happy to discuss your review and its merits. In the same way, I invite you to correct my prior and short review of RR.</p>
<p>xiggi, what are your opinions of "Maximum SAT?"</p>
<p>Godot is not responding...</p>
<p>Relax, this is not a contest. Remember that some posters have professional obligations during the day!</p>
<p>All right, I finally have a little time to respond to xiggi's request for an elaboration on my review of Grammatix. I would also like to respond to some of the points that Mike brought up in his previous responses to my review.</p>
<p>Reading my review over, I still stand by most parts of it, but I would also like to amend some parts. I may have misunderstood one part of the book and was perhaps overly harsh with some comments. In the interest of fairness and respect, I will review some statements of mine.</p>
<p>There are many issues that require commentary. Therefore, I will subdivide the discussion into several sections.</p>
<p>Guessing strategy</p>
<p>Mike perhaps misunderstood my criticism of his guessing strategy previously. My students often guess intelligently. That is, they are instructed to guess on a question even when they have crossed off only one answer out of five. I know that Mike would disagree with this advice, and I can understand his reasons. Yet, my students have proven over and over again that guessing DOES work, and they often guess correctly on a question, even when they cannot eliminate definitely four of the answer choices (though they often eliminate at least two or three).</p>
<p>Let's take an example:</p>
<p>A student crosses off choices A, C, and D on a question. She is left with only two choices, B and E. She cannot recognize another wrong answer pattern in B or E. Mike would instruct the student to skip the question and move on. I would tell the student to BLINDLY guess between B and E. Mike would counter that the student would gravitate towards the trap answer (if there is one remaining there). This may very welll be true for the untrained student (a student that I called the "average, untrained student" previously -- this was NOT meant to indicate that all of Mike's students are average!), someone who has not worked with me. But MY students have been well trained to avoid gravitating towards trap answers and to simply guess RANDOMLY (if anything, they can recognize the trap answers among the remaining ones and choose the OTHER answer). It seems like a waste of a question (and time, since most students would spend at least a minute crossing off 3 answer choices) to NOT guess on the question! In my experience, students CAN and DO guess correctly on such questions. So students are told to guess not only when they can confidently cross off four answer choices (what Mike would NOT call guessing), but even when they can merely cross off one to three only. I'm not saying Mike's approach or philosophy is bad -- it may very well work quite well for his students -- just that mine works as well, too.</p>
<p>Average students</p>
<p>I never stated that Mike's students were all average. In commenting on the RC approach, I stated that the process may be useful for beginners. That doesn't mean, however, that all of Mike's students are beginners or average, and it also does not mean that the RC approach is only effective for beginners.</p>
<p>Vocabulary study</p>
<p>I've already given my rationale for advocating vocabulary study in detail in a previous post. Once again, I understand Mike's reasons for not pushing vocabulary and agree that there are some pitfalls that go with an undisciplined approach to learning vocabulary. There pitfalls are largely avoided by my students through my training them to learn vocabulary in the right way. I was probably too harsh in insinuating that Mike was lazy or over-confident in avoiding the study of vocabulary (that's before I fully understood his reasons for not pushing it), and I wish to apologize for that. Mike, I think you're an assiduous fellow. :)</p>
<p>[continued in next post]</p>
<p>10 real sats, i practiced it and with bit of vocab help is scored 800 on verbal.... i really think it is the best thing to do... of course some luck also helped :p</p>
<p>Reading Comprehension Approach</p>
<p>Mike gives a good process for attacking Reading Comprehension questions in the Grammatix guide. Most of us would agree that Reading Comprehension questions give students the most grief on the CR section. It's a section that's difficult to teach well, and Mike does an admirable job of it. Nonetheless, I feel that his discussion could have delved into more detail with specific question types or passage types. For example, one thing he could have discussed is how to approach inference questions. Or perhaps he could have provided a discussion of fiction/narrative passages, which can be different in some small ways from other types of passages. There is no discussion on how to approach short passages differently from long passages, or a single passage vs. paired passages. RocketReview's section on Reading Comprehension, even though it is not wholly satisfactory, does provide that extra level of detail that may be just the nudge that a more advanced student needs to get those extra points.</p>
<p>Nevertheless, I want to reiterate that I am <em>not</em> saying that the RC approach outlined in the Grammatix guide will not be useful for more advanced students! It may very well be, but the section could have probably benefited from a more thorough discussion.</p>
<p>Math Section</p>
<p>I had stated in my review that I thought the Math section was inadequate. Mike did a good job in providing the Math Toolbox, a basic review of the mathematical concepts that appear on the SAT. Nevertheless, the review is not complete. From a cursory read of the Toolbox, I can find the following deficiencies (note that it is not my job to be an editor for Mike, so I don't pretend that the following list is complete):</p>
<ol>
<li><p>The discussion of the third-side inequality for triangles is not complete (he only mentions that the sum of the lengths of two of the sides is greater than the third side, but not that the third side is also greater than the difference of the lengths of the other two sides).</p></li>
<li><p>There is no mention of transformations of functions (e.g., f(x) + 2).</p></li>
<li><p>The discussion of the domain of functions is not complete. The guide fails to mention that an x value that results in division by zero is also forbidden.</p></li>
<li><p>The guide does not include the method of adding or subtracting a system of equations, probably the more effective method of solving them.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>This is one area in which RocketReview proves superior. Adam Robinson provides a very thorough and comprehensive review of the math topics that can appear on the SAT Math section. I only found perhaps one or two small topics that the review boxes at the end of the book did not cover.</p>
<p>The strength of RR, however, does not merely lie in the thorough review of the math. In fact, most SAT books do a good job of reviewing the math. This, in itself, however, should not constitute the bulk of the Math discussion! Most strong math students do not get mediocre scores on the math section because they do not have a good understanding and knowledge of the math, but because they are tricked by the questions, not accustomed to the way the concepts are applied or asked about, and/or because they are not careful. RR, through its various "Experience Sets," addresses most of these issues and gives ways to avoid such traps. In addition, RR teaches "tried-and-true" techniques such as making up numbers, working backwards with the answer choices, using the figure, etc., that are certainly <em>not</em> novel or revolutionary, but still <em>WORK</em> (isn't that what counts?). Grammatix, on the other hand, gives a good, solid process for approaching Math questions (a process which is not all that different from the approach that is implied in most other SAT books), but does not really give students these additional techniques to maximize their points on the section. Xiggi might argue that RR does not really give any new math techniques. It actually kind of does, in the form of what it calls "WIBNI" (a very ugly name, by the way) or what I would call "simplifying a question." Even if none of the techniques are new, however, they are still effective, and THAT is what matters. (Additionally, they are most likely going to be new for the beginning student.)</p>
<p>Some parts of the Hidden Patterns and Math Problem Completion Process are not entirely clear or satisfactory. I am a little confused by Hidden Pattern 3 in the Math section; I'm not sure what Mike is referring to there. That part may need a little more explanation. I'm also not so sure that Step 6 in the Math Completion Process is all that necessary. Of course, on the other sections (CR and Writing), we instruct students to thoroughly read ALL of the answer choices and often eliminate every one except the correct answer. This is not as important, however, on the Math section. I ask my students to look through the answer choices on a Math question when they START it or if they cannot figure out a direct solution. I'm not so sure this is paramount at the END of a question; this would seem to take a LONG time (and would defeat the point of looking for a 30-second solution). If a student is confident about her work (and she should be, following the process), there is no reason to have to second-guess the answer. It may be better to ask the student to re-read the question or to re-check the work to avoid careless errors.</p>
<p>Overall, I like Mike's philosophy of looking for a 30-second solution to a Math question (even though I don't think 100% of Math questions can be done in less than 30 seconds -- but that's already been discussed before), but I don't think he offers quite enough tools, techniques, and discussion to show the students HOW to find this 30-second solution (although the solutions to Official SAT Study Guide questions DO help) and how to avoid common mistakes and traps. In the Hidden Patterns section, for example, Mike does not give a full discussion of the "Joe Bloggs" answer to hard questions, something that can help many students.</p>
<p>In general, then, Mike's discussion of the Math section (excluding his Math Toolbox, which serves as an adequate, if not completely comprehensive, review) is too brief and does not offer enough tools. RocketReview, in contrast, devotes many more pages to the Math section, and I find most of the discussion and techniques in that book to be quite effective and high-impact. Additionally, the practice exam at the end of RR is EXCELLENT (there is an updated exam on the website, <a href="http://www.rocketreview.com%5B/url%5D">www.rocketreview.com</a>) -- the math questions have the just the right flavor and are challenging enough -- although the author does not include any explanations of the answers, one major flaw.</p>
<p>[continued in next post]</p>
<p>Essay section</p>
<p>Mike gives a good 14-step process for writing an essay. Most SAT books, in contrast, provide very brief or WRONG advice for approaching the essay. I still do not agree, however, with his selection of types of examples. It's fallacious to state that most essays using historical and/or literary examples did not earn high scores on the SAT. In fact, judging from the essays that CCers have posted, it would seem that essays using such examples do at least as well, if not better, than essays using other types of evidence. My students, virtually all of whom wrote essays using historical and/or literary examples, scored roughly an average of 10 out of 12 on the March 12 essay. Also, it's been shown, in a report from none other than the College Board itself on the SAT II: Writing exam (you can dig it up yourself on collegeboard.com), that essays using historical and/or literary examples were given slightly higher ratings than essays not using such evidence. Of course, one can argue that essay readers are not supposed to award more credit to essays that demonstrate academic knowledge, but they may nonetheless <em>unconsciously</em> reward such essays with higher scores. (Don't forget that essay readers are also not supposed to automatically reward longer essays with higher scores, but we also know that they DO usually.) Mike's approach may work well, but I submit that there is nothing wrong with using historical and/or literary examples.</p>
<p>By the way, I never stated that the Grammatix guide advocates a two-paragraph essay. Mike doesn't.</p>
<p>Writing MC section</p>
<p>Let me say that I misunderstood the purpose of the initial section here previously in my review. I had thought it was a mere definition of various parts of speech, but it's much more than that. Mike does give a good discussion of various kinds of errors that one frequently encounters on the Writing section. He DOES provide illustrative sentences in this section; they are decent. I did find the illustrative sentences in RocketReview to be more subtle and challenging (and, hence, a better test of understanding). The discussion of the errors is probably better than I've seen in some other books (particularly, Barron's, which has a woefully inadequate discussion of Writing MC, although its practice questions are actually great). Still, the section is not comprehensive. For example, the discussion of verb tenses (verb errors are one of the most common on the exam) can be expanded to offer details on the "perfect" aspects and the subjunctive. There is a discussion of dangling participles (technically,the illustrative sentences actually contain misplaced participles, not dangling ones), but the author does not provide examples of dangling participles or other kinds of modifier errors. There are no illustrations of logical comparison errors or parallelism errors (again, I am not Mike's editor, so this is only a list of things that come to mind right now), which frequently show up on the exam. The Toolbox, then, can be more thorough and comprehensive.</p>
<p>Now we turn our attention to what I call the "bad patterns, good patterns boxes" (what Mike calls "Higher-Level Concepts"). This is where I have my major gripe. There are NO illustrative sentences (this is what I was referring to in my review) whatsoever of the "patterns." Moreover, the list is not entirely complete, once again. One thing missing that I can think of is the distinction between "number" and "amount" (an issue addressed in RocketReview). There is also no mention of diction errors anywhere (in the patterns boxes or the Toolbox)! RR, on the other hand, gives ample and good illustrations of these and most other types of errors on the Writing MC section; that's why I prefer working with that book to teach the Writing section. The infamous "error" I mentioned in my review also occurs here: on page 139, in the fourth bad pattern, the use of the word "conjunction" is not entirely clear. A student reading both the bad pattern and corresponding good pattern will likely be confused as to why the use of a conjunction is bad in one case and good in another. It's quite confusing. To mitigate my criticism here, I should add that the boxes are still a fairly good, if incomplete, review of the common error types and mention about two or three common errors that most other books do not emphasize.</p>
<p>I do like the brief, but effective, discussion of the Improving Paragraphs questions. And the process for working Identifying Sentence Errors questions is particularly good (although I do not necessarily require my students to do step 5 if they are CERTAIN they've found an error and can justify it grammatically). RocketReview gives more "bad patterns" to look for in the answer choices (such as a choice that repeats the error) for Improving Sentences questions, but Grammatix's discussion is still fairly effective.</p>
<p>On the whole, I find that RocketReview provides good stratgies for both the essay section and Writing MC section and contains a very good review (along with great illustrative sentences) of the most common errors that can appear on the Writing MC section. It's not perfect, however; one of its major omissions is a discussion on tricky tenses and the subjunctive mood (for a very thorough treatment of common errors, try McGraw-Hill's SAT I). The Grammatix guide's Writing section is good, too, although it has more flaws and omissions than RR.</p>
<p>[continued in next post]</p>
<p>Illustrative Solutions</p>
<p>Once again, I appreciate that Mike provided solutions to questions drawn directly from the Official SAT Study Guide. It's nice to see his methods in action. This is perhaps one major flaw of RocketReview; it was written and published before the Official SAT Study Guide was introduced, so Adam Robinson does not provide solutions to its questions in his book.</p>
<p>As I stated previously, I wish that Mike had given solutions to far more SAT questions. One reason he offered for not doing so is to avoid using up the practice tests in the book. He may forget, however, that students can always turn to the solutions AFTER they have completed a test on their own and that, even if they do this before working a test, burning up a test or two in the book is not really a big deal. After all, his solutions in the Grammatix guide do not even cover one entire test in the Study Guide, but merely one section each, currently; students can benefit from more solutions and explication of exactly how his methods work in a multitude of situations and problems.</p>
<p>Intuitive or non-intuitive</p>
<p>I accused Mike in my review of perhaps deliberately trying to be "non-intuitive." This was probably unfair. He's right in that if his methods work, and they turn out to be non-intuitive, so be it. So while his techniques may indeed not be intuitive (a characterization which may apply to SOME of them), this really has nothing to do with the strength of the book or the methods.</p>
<p>Authors personally answering questions</p>
<p>I think it's quite commendable that Mike personally answers questions from students who purchase his book. That would seem to be a great service. I work one-on-one with my students, so I don't have to offer e-mail assistance, of course (although I encourage them to call me with quick questions if they have any -- they rarely do :) ). Most test prep authors would definitely not go to such lengths to help their students. To be fair, however, I know that Adam Robinson, author of RocketReview, DOES personally answer e-mails book buyers send to him. I actually sent an e-mail a while ago to point out an error in a review on his website, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that he answered the e-mail within 2 hours. I only wish I could be that dedicated should I ever choose to write my own SAT book. :)</p>
<p>Concluding thoughts and summary</p>
<p>As the reader can see, both Grammatix and RocketReview have their strengths and flaws. I like RocketRevew better, since it has a fuller and more comprehensive discussion of the major concepts and techniques, but Grammatix is by no means a bad guide. Despite the deficiencies and flaws I have already pointed out in detail, Grammatix can probably help most readers improve their scores on the Critical Reading and Writing sections. I do have reservations about the effectiveness of the Math section, but I'm sure some students have gained from that section as well in the past. For those who like numbers, I would probably give Grammatix a 7.5 out of 10 overall and RocketReview an 8.5 out of 10.</p>
<p>I hope this series of posts has been insightful and explains points raised in my review more fully. (Let me know if you found it helpful.) Please understand that I respect Mike as an author and test prep expert, and it is not my intention to attack or demean him personally. I have merely offered criticism on the merits of the Guide itself. </p>
<p>One request I have for Xiggi is a <em>full</em> discussion of what you think are the errors and deficiencies in RocketReview (your review of the book was very brief and vague). I am really curious as to exactly why you found the book unsatisfying.</p>
<p>Any comments or questions from any of you would be welcome and greatly appreciated. :)</p>
<p>Your post is funny. You are the first one on CC who claim RR is better than Grammatix. This is an awefully long post, I will be making a constructive response to it later on :)</p>
<p>Hi Godot,</p>
<p>I will definitely take into consideration what you've written. I sincerely appreciate the spirit of goodwill in which it was offered, as well, and I will do my best to keep it up as I respond in a general way to your remarks. :)</p>
<p>I'm pretty tired and busy at the moment, so I apologize if what I'm about to write is disjointed or poorly organized . . .</p>
<p>I do disagree with several of the things you've written, but I honestly have no desire to pick through each page of my Guide debating my choices, and I imagine you don't want to do that either. So I'll hit on some of the bigger areas where I disagree, but I'm willing to acknowledge that in many of the areas (guessing, for instance) reasonable professional minds like our own may differ as to what should be included in SAT prep and what should not.</p>
<p>I should add at this point that I haven't heard anything from students yet about any deficiencies in the Guide or inconsistencies with the actual SAT test.</p>
<p>I checked the conjunction issue you noted at 139 but still don't see any ambiguity. Of course, since I actually wrote the Guide, the fact that I don't see any ambiguity doesn't mean there isn't any. I'll run it by the ol' "editorial board" (friends, family, students) and see what they say about it.</p>
<p>You're right about the dangling-versus-misplaced participles issue. I don't know how I missed that. Still, though, the errors described in that discussion do occur on the SAT, and the test never asks students to identify or classify errors by name. In other words, the fact that the error is inaccurately labeled should not affect a student's SAT performance because the SAT won't ask a student what the error is called. I'll revise this in the next release of the materials, but on its own I don't think it warrants a new version of the Guide.</p>
<p>As to the things you described as missing from the Guide, in my view they fall into two categories: things I've included by condensing them into other topics, and things I have deliberately chosen to omit or treat in a cursory manner because I don't see them coming up on the test. Many of the things I leave out of the Guide receive as much consideration in the writing process as the things I include.</p>
<p>In the first group are some of the things you mentioned in the WMC section. For example, I don't specifically use the phrase "logical comparison error," but I do discuss this type of issue at pages 134 and 140 of the Guide, and a student who follows the advice on those two pages will not miss any question with such an error. The same sort of thing goes for parallelism, which is covered--but perhaps not in the normal way--on pages 138 and 140. It's true that the coverage of these areas could be more in-depth, but my goal was to communicate, as quickly as possible, what a student needs for the SAT-- and <em>only</em> what a student needs for the SAT. The same sort of thing goes for the short-versus-long reading passages in the CR section: in my opinion, while those question types are unquestionably different in appearance, they can both be successfully attacked in the same way.</p>
<p>Of course, as I mentioned, we may differ as to where the line should be drawn between covering necessary knowledge for the test and over-preparing. But in my professional opinion, I'm happy with where I've put the line.</p>
<p>The second group includes things like my treatment of function domains. While I do not specifically address the fact that a domain does not exist where a value of x would cause division by zero, I do explain how to evaluate a function, and I further explain that the domain exists wherever the function can be evaluated--a student who understands these concepts understands that a function has no domain where its denominator would be zero. More importantly to my way of thinking, I have not seen a real SAT question from the College Board that turned on this issue, which is why it is not treated in more detail. I don't cover the alternative solution to system-of-equation problems (the addition method you noted) because, in my experience, students either already know it or don't understand it enough to make it work; by providing an alternative approach that always works, I try to avoid the possibility that student may be unnecessarily confused. The same goes for things like the subjunctive--I just don't see it on the test (except for the arguably subjunctive construction "would have" in certain conditional sentences, but that's covered on page 136).</p>
<p>I could go on, but like I said I don't want this to be any longer than it needs to. As I said above, in writing my materials, I have always tried to include exactly what a student needs to know for the SAT and no more. I base my sense of what a student needs to be taught on my fairly extensive experience dealing with real students. While I do still believe that my guide covers every single thing on the SAT, and that any student who understands everything in it should score extremely well on the test, I can respect the possibility that your professional experience might lead you to disagree with me.</p>
<p>This actually touches on something I'm about to post in the parents forum, under Xiggi's thread. I guess one fundamental difference between myself and some of the posters on that thread (maybe also you, I don't know) is that I don't see the SAT as an inherently intellectually challenging pursuit, and, accordingly, I don't think that preparing for the test should necessarily involve teaching a student anything of any real intellectual value. (In fact, as noted in my Guide, I think that taking an overly intelligent or "collegiate" approach to the test can hurt a student.) A student who studies and practices with my Guide will hopefully come to a fuller understanding of the test itself, but it's not my intention that she should get anything more than that from working with me. (I should note that many students have reported general increases in test performance at school after they used the Guide. While I think that's great, my goal isn't to help people get better grades--it's to help them get better SAT scores.)</p>
<p>Accordingly, where you may see mistakes and omissions in my approach, I might see your approach as being unnecessarily lengthy. But this is one more area where reasonable people may disagree. Some people may feel that an SAT prep class serves its students better when it covers things like the subjunctive. I'm fine with that, even if I disagree.</p>
<p>At any rate, thanks again for going to all the trouble. I hope this response doesn't come off as overly defensive. I'm not trying to re-ignite an old argument; I just wanted to make sure that anybody reading your review also has a chance to read my explanation of the choices I've made.</p>
<p>Mike</p>
<p>"Work smart, not hard"</p>