<p>also, which do you use and is it effective?</p>
<p>I took the Princeton Review Course & it helped immensely. Their guarantee really is accurate if you do the work. However, if you don't want to cough up $800, I can give you some tips. We used the "Manual for the New SAT" and "11 Practice Tests for the NEW SAT." The manual WOrks. If you have about 1-2 months to prepare it is ideal to work through the book step by step. We also took 3 diagnostic tests (one each saturday). That probably helped the most. So my best suggestion is to buy the practice tests and take a TOn of practice tests.</p>
<p>I hated princeton review course. I do like their books though.</p>
<p>My son (great test taker but we were worried about the writing section) took Kaplan through school. We hated it. The "practice test" writing sections were graded in a useless manner. Twice my son got zeros on the essay. I read one of the two and it wasn't great, but it was no zero. No comments whatsoever. The second time they didn't even return the essay. The third essay was graded in a reasonable fashion with a few sparse, but not out of line comments. If you only want to practice one portion of the test you are out of luck, because they do a little bit of everything each time. I'm much more inclined to pay my next kid to self study next time round. We'll all be winners.</p>
<p>I thought Princeton was very inaccurate. Their methods do not target higher scoring students, mostly average students benefit the most. I felt their practice tests were very misleading, some being extremely difficult (the first one) and the last one was WAY too easy, and gave false confidence to the taker, and my score compared to my last practice test dropped 200 points.</p>
<p>I believe that for the general SAT prep, the CB Blue Book provided well rounded experience because it had extremely accurate tests (I scored within the predicted range on the actual SAT that I did on the practice). The only problem is, while the analysis in the first part of the book is great, the pracitce tests don't have explanations.</p>
<p>I totally agree with admanrich!</p>
<p>The course might target average scoring students, but if you have a very high score why would you need the 200 point guarantee? No one can guarantee that you will make a perfect score, but I think the point of the course is to familiarize yourself with the test and know exactly what questions to expect so you can increase your speed and accuracy. After taking the practice tests so many times, you learn to become a test taking machine. The strategies you learn can help you solve problems you don't know how to solve so that you can reason though them - that's why I liked it.
Also the different difficulties of the practice tests may be good to learn from because you never know what to expect from ETS. :)</p>