I brought a the Princeton Review Book “Cracking the ACT” but soon after decided to only take the Redesigned SAT but I don’t want that book to go to.
So my question is how useful will the practice tests, topic review, chapter exercises in the 3 different sections for the NEW SAT.
Pretty good for Reading, although ACT answers are usually more verbatim from the passage than SAT answers (and the questions aren’t sequential in the passages).
Prepscholar talks in their blog about how to study for the new SAT in 2016.
For reading practice for the new SAT, I would use old SAT CR without the sentence completions rather than ACT readings. In addition, for each reading comprehension question, answer the further question, “Which lines in the passage justify your answer choice?” ACT readings are easier. Some ACT Science readings have the right complexity level, but they are short.
However, even most old SAT CR passages are a little too easy because CB increased the rhetorical and lexical complexity of the passages to compensate for the lack of sentence completions. Try to pick out the hardest old CR passages and practice on those. The really hard old CR passages are close in level to the hardest new R, although the content is still different.
Don’t underestimate the importance of timing. To practice timing, assemble 5 hard long CR passages (one double-long), one in each area, and do them in 65 minutes. DON’T follow the old CR timing or the ACT timing. You have to be able to read and answer questions for 65 minutes without a break. If you don’t like to read this long, you need to practice timing a lot. If you are going to use ACT reading sections, do two sections back-to-back (70 minutes).