<p>How does the Cracking the SATI book's practice tests compare to the actual test in terms of difficulty?</p>
<p>It's not that the PR tests are harder or easier, the problem is that they do not accurately match what you see on the actual SAT. They will not give you an accurate picture of your score. Between the CB's Blue Book, the free SAT they released last year, and the current free test, there are 10 CB exams to practice on. If you want to splurge on their online course, you'll have access to 5 additional tests (note that the pre-test and one of the online tests have been previously released).</p>
<p>I also have the Blue Book, and I know that the actual SAT is different from PR's practice tests, but I was wondering about their relative difficulty (as in is some of the stuff on PR's tests harder than anything you'll see on the actual SAT and vice versa).</p>
<p>I wouldn't recommend the Princeton Review for several reasons:</p>
<p>First, the scoring chart is sometimes way off, i.e I would miss two problems for the entire math section and get like a 640
Second, the difficulty of the PR is much easier compared to the real SATs (especially Writing and Math)</p>
<p>If you are bent on self-studying for the SATs, I cannot praise the "Blue Book" enough. The practice tests are nearly of equal difficulty to the actual test.</p>
<p>I'll put it another way. The Chemistry AP test is much harder than the SAT. The DMV driving test is much easier. But their difficulty is beside the point because they don't compare directly to the SAT. PR has some math problems, for instance, that simply do not come up on the SAT. If you know how to do that math, you may get the question right and think you'll get a good score. If you don't know how to do this math, you'll think you're going to score low. The truth is that the problem is irrelevant and can't be used to predict your score any more than the DMV test can. By all means, if you have churned through all the CB tests, the PR book will have a decent sampling of problems on which to practice. But just don't try to interpret a score from it. Developing and scaling an SAT is best left to the professionals.</p>