Kaplan SAT Subject Test: Physics

First, background: I bought this book along with the Princeton Review Physics book with about two months to go before the exam. Unfortunately, I had only taken a year of IB Physics, so I only knew about half the things I was supposed to know: I had some vague knowledge of Electricity and Magnetism, with absolutely no knowledge of nuclear physics and relativity. Hey, I needed a science credit. Anyway: The nice thing about this book is that the explanations were very easy to follow. It gave you a nice, general grounding in the areas you needed to know without really delving deeply into anything- essentially, SAT Physics for crammers in its purest form. This was pretty good for me, as I had a lot to learn and only a limited time to learn it in. There are handy practice quizzes after every chapter, and there are 4 full practice tests at the end of the section, which isn't bad. Of course, this method has its problems. I took the test and found out that this book actually does not cover every topic that is tested on the SAT, either giving too little information in some cases or missing entire topics completely. For instance, there was a question on Gauss's Law and Gaussian surfaces in the test I took (which was never mentioned in this textbook). This actually didn't affect me in the end, as I still got enough right to get an 800, but I was rather disappointed by that. I recommend buying this book if you intend to cram a couple of weeks before the exam, or if you just need a quick, general review. Otherwise, I would suggest that you buy this book in conjunction with Princeton Review's book- While this book is a much better teacher of the basics than PR and is easier to follow, PR covers some topics much more thoroughly than Kaplan, so I sugggest reading that after you've gone through Kaplan if you want to ensure that you get 750+ on the test.

Good test, but I should like to see more question with real live.