Kaplan SAT Critical Reading Workbook

I'm currently a junior in high school, and I found this book to be an excellent resource while I prepared for my PSAT's and, this year, for my SAT's. My sophomore year PSAT Critical Reading score was a 63, significantly lower than my scores in the other two sections. Determined to bring up my score, I bought this book in the hopes of achieving my goal. Needless to say, I was not disappointed! I found the tips at the beginning to be extremely helpful, and I especially liked the fact that the entire book was broken down into different sections - sentence completions, short passage readings, and long passage readings - so I could easily identify and target my weaknesses. The list of root words at the end was also very beneficial, and when comparing that strategy to what most of my friends do (memorizing hundreds of vocabulary words), it was much more effective and helped me save a lot of time. Overall, I found the format of the book quite reader-friendly. Doing the exercises from this book and learning from my mistakes also allowed me to form new strategies for the next time I took a standardized test. Two weeks ago, a large envelope from my school showed up in my mailbox. It contained my junior year PSAT scores. To my delight, I found that I had scored a 72 on the Critical Reading section of this year's PSAT - a nine point improvement from last year - enabling me to qualify for National Merit Semifinalist status in my state by a wide margin! I would wholeheartedly recommend this book to anyone who is struggling with this section - thanks to it, I now consider Critical Reading to be the easiest section on the whole SAT.

This Kaplan Critical Reading Book, has a lot of good practice exericses and separates questions into the categories of sentence completion, short passage, and long passage. This enables you to target your weaknesses. The book also contains great root and vocabulary lists. However, my main criticism of this book is the practice tests. The tests in this book are good, but the format is not the same as the real SAT. On the real SAT, all three reading sections contain sentence completions, but in this book only two of the sections have sentence completions. Also, in the final section of the test, a long passage comes before a short passage. This does not happen either on the SAT. The difficulty of the questions is also different than on the real SAT. On this book the questions seem a bit easier. Also, there are countless questions where two answers seem reasonable. This happens on the real SAT, but not nearly as much as it does in the Kaplan book. However, overall this is a good book to prepare you for the SAT reading, but there is bound to be a better book out there.