Kaplan SAT Math Workbook: 4th Edition

Quite a useful book to provide a set of drills around common SAT problems. There are really no tutorials in there so wouldn't recommend it as a book to learn from. personally thought the structure around how the topics were broken up and then the questions within the topics [Easy/Medium/Hard] made it very approachable..my 13 year old went thru it pretty quickly and found it useful to highlight areas to work on.

We tried and reviewed all the workbooks:Grubers, McGraw, Princeton, Barron. My two teenagers thought that Kaplan did the best job of preparing for the SAT. However the practice tests in the book are not exactly like the real SAT. For that you need the Official SAT Study Guide.

After using Barrons Math Workbook to learn all the math concepts, I've used this book to practice as many SAT I level problems as much as possible. I've scored 780 on my test. I've done 1 set a day for a month and few days. There are 28 days. After solving all the sets in the book, SAT I Math was just a breeze.

In general, this book satisfies its purpose as being a math workbook, not lesson book, which provides a large number of SAT-like math questions, partitioned into categories. The book does not teach concepts like the Barron's book, but through doing the questions and reading the explanations you can extract the concepts and the train of thought. The only part where the book is slightly flawed is that some of its questions, towards the end of a question set, titled "hard," really require more thinking than is required on the real exam. However, this can only help your practice, but do not be discouraged if you can only solve some of those!

I used this book for about two weeks, completing all of the sections. I looked over all of the questions I had gotten wrong on my first go-around with the book on the Thursday bfore the test. I also took one of the practice tests, and it predicted within 20 points what I got on the real Math SAT. In my sophomore year, I had gotten a 640, which was disappointing, but after using this book for two short weeks my score shot up to a 720 (as a Junior)! I would recommend this book to anybody wishing to increase their score with a concise, concentrated workbook. Unless your score is very low on the Math section, a book full of basic skills and tricks will probably not help you. Using this workbook could be the difference between a mediocre 640 and a pretty-durn-good 720 (and only in two weeks).Good luck!PS: On the SAT, there was a problem that even used the same numbers as one of the questions in the Kaplan book! Weird...