I’m honestly just chilling tbh. But scores are out, yay!
@Cece0499 Haha nice. Yeah, I’m super happy! How’d you do?
I just wanted to give some advice to future bio SAT test takers because I went through this twice (bombed my 1st time, ran out of time as I switched between E and M continuously in the test and freaked out because I couldn’t choose - don’t do this- I know some people have time to do both and then choose, but unless you’re an insanely fast tester (first 60 in 20-30 minutes, max) then DON’T DO THIS. it puts unnecessary stress on you and you really don’t need any more of that epinephrine and norepinephrine running through your body. Just go in knowing which you’re going to take and force yourself to not look at the other sections and instead use your extra time to go back to questions you thought were difficult, or skipped, etc.)
Next, books. Barron’s is by FAR the best. I used PR and Kaplan for my 1st test (mostly PR). Kaplan is a waste of money and PR was pretty good imo. I read through the whole thing and took the tests. I did the same for Barron’s (I only focused on Barron’s my 2nd time around and it was enough for sure. Easy to read and understand and very detailed.) As people have said before, PR’s tests are the closest out of the prep books (Kaplan’s were meh) but Barron’s were very comprehensive and really let you understand what topics you were bad at. I also took a bunch of SparkNotes tests but those were just seeing if you had a basic knowledge of all the concepts, so if you have those, I recommend starting with them just to see if you have a general understanding of all the topics. Don’t take the scores for those especially too literally. Also, don’t study too much the week leading up to the test. It’ll likely freak you out. Just go over your notes and review, and take a lot of practice tests even if they’re not good/like the real one. You just want to keep your bio brain moving. I took the official the Sunday before the test on Saturday, and I felt like the timing was perfect because then I could quickly see where my score really was, quickly tackle the topics I was a little weaker at, and calm myself down.
MY SCORES (all E)- 2nd time around:
Princeton Review 1 (2nd time taking it after taking these in May for my 1st time around): 750
PR 2 (same as above): 720
Barron’s 1: 690
Barron’s 2: 760
Official practice book score: 750 (though I did get a 760 on M)
Actual test: 780 (95th percentile)
Hope this helps, and good luck to everyone taking it in the future!