Top products from r/SATACTprep

Full text:

I’m a Harvard grad with honors and professional tutor/coach since 2002 (SAT, ACT, LSAT, GRE, GMAT). I have attained perfect scores on the SAT and ACT, with every question answered correctly, and 99% scores on the LSAT, GRE and GMAT (see my website for proof). I have been now teaching SAT for 20 full years, ever since I worked as an instructor for Harvard's "Get Ready" community service test-prep program in the fall of 1998. I am the founder of McElroy Tutoring, who has employed over 500 tutors since 2002, and the "r/SATACTprep" subreddit on Reddit, with nearly 1,000 subscribers and growing. I am also the former employer of another tutor with a highly-ranked review of this book that's very similar to mine. In short, I'm the one who wrote the recipe for the jam...but you know what they say about imitation.

The Official SAT Study Guide 2020 Edition (currently $19), despite not having changed much from the 2018 edition, is still the most essential SAT preparation book on the market. This is neither because the book contains useful SAT strategy advice, nor because the answer explanations are particularly helpful or easy to understand—the strategy advice is almost nonexistent, and the answer explanations are sometimes insightful but far too often convoluted, simplistic and/or incomplete. Instead, the book’s primary value lies in the fact that it includes 8 full practice SATs for only about $.02 per page.

How is this book different from the 2018 edition of the Official SAT Study Guide (https://www.amazon.com/Official-SAT-Study-Guide-2018/dp/1457309289), of which you can also read my detailed Amazon customer review (#1 on top) ? The first 294 pages of the book (the portion before the tests) are exactly the same. 6 of the 8 tests are the same—though the order has been reversed. And the two new tests—which show up as the first two tests in the book—are the October 2018 and October 2017 SATs, respectively, which are not yet available for download through College Board but can be found easily with a Google search. SAT practice tests #2 and #4 are gone, though you can still find them easily with a Google search. If we agree to call the October 2018 SAT test #10, and the October 2017 SAT test #9, then the tests are in the order 10,9,8,7,6,5,3,1.

Although 6 of the 8 the tests in this book are indeed free to download from the College Board / Khan Academy websites and print out at home (I expect the other 2 to be available as free PDF downloads soon), the cost of doing so would most likely exceed $19 unless you have a free/low-cost printing option. In addition, there is significant value in having all the tests literally bound together in one place—it makes it easy to stay organized, and since the SAT doesn’t provide scratch paper, you can practice by taking all of your notes right there in the book.

In fact, I would suggest that you buy 2 copies of this book: one for taking notes, and the other to keep blank, so that you can review questions later without bias. This is known as the “blind review” method and it works wonders.

You will notice that there is no Kindle version of this book, but again, you can download PDFs of the individual tests, scoring guides and answer explanations from the College Board / Khan Academy websites for free, which is far easier than the Kindle format anyway. That being said, it would be nice if the College Board would put a PDF of the entire book on its website as well--the first 300 pages of the book do include some useful advice on the essay, for example--though again, that advice could be vastly improved.

Of course, these 8 official SATs are just scratching the surface of what’s out there in terms of official SAT practice material: as of this writing I’ve counted 36 official SATs and PSATs in the new format that are publicly available online—and that doesn’t include other test forms that have been leaked.

Finally, in 2015, I also wrote an exhaustive Amazon review of the original (2016) edition of this book (https://www.amazon.com/Official-SAT-Study-Guide-2016/dp/1457304309), which I’m happy to say is also the #1 review of that book on Amazon. Please feel free to give that review a read as well, and to google “SAT Action Plan: How to Study and Prepare for the SAT College Entrance Exam” for a full list of my personal SAT prep recommendations.

Best of luck on your SAT and beyond,

-Brian