Inside the SAT: 10 Strategies to Help You Score Higher

by Kaplan Inc. and Kaplan Test Prep

Offers a mix of tips, strategies, and practice questions to help students avoid common mistakes. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1419541757
• ISBN13: 9781419541759
• Release Date: June 2006
• Publisher: Kaplan
• Length: 258 Pages
• Weight: 0.29 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 4.3" x 6.7"

Customer Reviews

Excellent book for SAT Preparation

Kaplan has some pretty good stuff on test preparation and vocabulary, so I decided to get this little book about the SAT. What is nice about this specific book is its size. It is fairly small, meaning that it is not a major burden to carry around, and is quite convenient as a quick reference. This is significant for the usual student who is lugging many other heavier books. As far as the book itself, it tries to breakdown the essence of the SAT for someone who is either not familiar with the test or needs practice or a reference point for what to expect. For instance, the first chapter is just relevant information about how many times the test comes up, a breakdown of the various sections of the SAT (critical reading, math, writing, experimental), how the test is scored, and some quick tips when going in to take the test. Subsequent chapters are as follows: Chapter 2: Breaks down specific steps and strategies to use when taking the test. Some of these are fairly basic (one of them is know the directions in advance), but, nonetheless, they are imperative to know when taking the test. Chapter 3: How to write a high-scoring essay. This chapter is useful in that it gives the potential SAT test taker a rubric for each of the scores of essays (from one to six) and then also shows examples for each of these scores. Chapter 4: Deals with breaking down and tackling multiple choice questions, and also includes some sample passages, questions and then answers to those questions. Very helpful. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 all focus on the mathematics portion of the test. They go over the various concepts for math (such as remainders, averages, etc) and then eventually go into more challenging concepts in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 is dedicated to "Math Traps," that is difficulties a student may get into when reading such items as word problems, or "trick" questions. There are some detailed points here, as well as just some helpful tips for testers, such as knowing that math problems go from simple to difficult on the test. Chapter 8 shifts to reading comprehension, showing some sample passages as well as typical questions for these passages. There is a segment on how to break down tough test questions by simplifying and looking for choice words. There is also a sample passage along with ways in which a student can "map" the passage by taking notes as they read during the test. Very helpful chapter. Chapter 9 deals with sentence completion questions, such as analogies and understanding sentence context. There are some sample questions with various analogies as well as sentence completions, and then a list of the answers with a detailed explanation. Chapter 10 is a quick chapter detailing how a student can go about building vocabulary, as well as understanding various word derivatives and forms. Over all, this is probably information you can find in many other books that are geared towards passing high stakes tests such as the SAT. However, for the small