<p>Hey everybody,Im a Vietnamese student and I gonna take the new SAT test next year. So do you guys have any ideas to recommend me what book i should take? (frankly, Im a poor guy so I have to consider carefully and be sure that I gonna take the right book!) Beside the Princeton review and the official guidebook for SAT of Collegeboard 20$ book,what book i should get more? and for MATH 1c and 2c ,SAT II physics,French ,does Princeton review issue a good one or there is still another one better than PR's ?Please give me yr advice!
cheers,</p>
<p>the official new sat book from the collegeboard itself will definitely help most b/c it's actually from them.
For the others, search this forum! (or google it using "site:collegeconfidential.com")</p>
<p>hey daniel,what do u mean "search this forum!".sry,but i get confused.By the way,could u have any idea in which books i should get for SAT II MATH 2c and physic,french?</p>
<p>goto ebay and buy the prep books, </p>
<p>as long as you get a new one and you're good with math you should be able to scrape by with older review's CR and SATII writing section prep.</p>
<p>for math iic, kaplan is a nice review</p>
<p>seraching forum means to find something on this part of the website
to search the forum, you can use the forum's search function; look at the top of the screen and click that button labeled "search"</p>
<p>or, better yet, use [url=<a href="http://www.google.com%5DGoogle%5B/url">http://www.google.com]Google[/url</a>]</p>
<p>and use the serach
[quote]
* site:collegeconfidential.com
[/quote]
</p>
<p>and replace * with something like "sat prep book"</p>
<p>(I simply used the quote funciton because there isn't a code function here, i believe)</p>
<p>If you can score at least a 600 on any section without test prep, I really wouldn't recommend the Princeton Review book I read through it in about 3-4 days of about an hour or so a day. I can't really say I gained anything out of it except familiarity with the types of problems you'll experience, which you'll get from (I would hope!) any book. I also have the College Board book and, although I haven't read over it, it looks pretty sterile nothing exciting, but it gives you what you need. You should probably already be familiar with most of the concepts, however. If you were to only buy one book, though, I would heartily suggest the McGraw Hill book; it's well written, the lessons are excellent, and the practice tests are good. Lots of people seem to note that different books have different problems and ones with "weird wording" and whatnot, but frankly I haven't really noticed much difference. The McGraw Hill practice tests are a bit harder, but not too much. The questions in the lessons can are usually much more complicated than the ones you'll see; they purposely try and trip you up and present not-immediately-obvious problems, which is good.</p>
<p>I also completely worked through Barron's math workbook and I found that the practice problems are fairly good if you're already familiar with the questions. There are about 15-25 questions per section if I recall correctly. This is important if you get the McGraw Hill book because you only get about 4 or 5 questions per section and a concept review (don't skip over these). The lessons are completely useless if you're actually looking to learn a concept. I can't speak for Barron's other products but the book I used had a tendency to stick generic math definitions and an overreliance on formulas. The only real formulas you have to remember are the Pythagorean theorem, and the perimeter and area of squares and circles. Those are listed in every section if you forget them anyway the rest of the formulas you can derive yourself.</p>
<p>If you actually need to learn certain math concepts, McGraw Hill's book is better than anything I've seen (not that my scope of SAT books is great). Even if you know how to do something and all the little tricks, I still suggest reading over the lessons at least. I never really had problems with exponents in Algebra 2, but the McGraw Hill book really opened them up for me and made manipulation with them as fluid as algebra. If you can find one of these books in your library, flip to any lesson and you'll see what I mean. I didn't have the luxury of doing the same, but the favorable reviews on Amazon persuaded me to buy it myself.</p>
<p>Perhaps what I like most about the book is that although it is obviously focused on the SAT, it seems more like studying the concepts themselves rather than testing for the SAT. It presents the concepts that the test will test and then teaches them. The lessons themselves don't really discuss the questions that you'll have. It rather presupposes that if you understand the concepts well, the questions should come easily. It doesn't state this explicitly, but it seems logical enough. The book is also very comfortable (enjoyable, even) to read. It isn't completely detached like the College Board's guide or Barron's book (again, I'm just going off of the book I used), nor is it as chatty as REA's book.</p>
<p>Anyway, I realize that this post is all over the place, but as you can tell, from my brief experience with SAT prep books, the McGraw Hill one is my preference :).</p>
<p>P.S. If you're wondering about why I constantly referred to the math section, it's because it's the section with which I wanted to improve most. The critical reading section is of course hard to teach, but I can't really see any other book teaching it much better than McGraw Hill book did. For what it's worth, I got a 680 on the last critical reading and this time I'm fairly confident I got a 760+ on it, even though people said it was harder. I wouldn't completely attribute my (predicted) improved score to the book, because I wasn't really focusing on the reading section the second time anyway, but I think the lessons turned on a bit of a lightbulb and made me approach the reading selections betterI'm already a fairly decent reader, so I just needed to make the link between reading and answering the questions. The grammar review was about as good as the math, although the math was very good. It filled in a lot of gaps and defined explicitly some of the things I half-knew intuitively, allowing me to better answer some of the more complex questions. The only ambiguous lesson was the one of the subjunctive mood: It doesn't explicitly state the grammatical properties of the mood, so if you are completely unfamiliar with it, it might catch you off guard. I don't really have a suggestion for understanding the mood better other than checking out some grammar books from the library.</p>
<p>Phew. I thought this was just going to be about a paragraph... I have tendency to ramble on sometimes :).</p>
<p>Oh Syn!You has just shared a bunch of yr invaluable experience to me? Im sure to get a McGraw Hill book and check out what's really in that.Its bitterly ironic when Im quite of sucking in reading and the verbal section will probably struggle me but not the math one.Anywaii,Thx so much for yr post!cheers,
PS:(my YIM is:stormboyus99, I hope we could talk sometime!)
Nice to meet u all!</p>
<p>Thanks syn, those are the kinda reviews I strive to look for in this search for SAT prep. Seriously, that was awesome, thanks :)</p>