CEEAE's Review of Barron's SAT 2400

FULL REVIEW
STRATEGIES BUT NO PRACTICE TESTS
The first thing that the reader notices about Barron's SAT 2400 is that it is bereft of any practice exams. However, this book purports to be a strategy book that caters to students seeking extraordinary scores on the SAT. Since this book seeks only to provide strategies, there is no necessary requirement to feature practice tests. However, anyone purchasing this book should be aware of this unusual format.

Anyone reading this review is likely to now ask: "if there are no practice tests and virtually every other prep book has tests, what does this book have that justifies spending my (or my parents') hard earned money?" The answer is that it is full of some of the best strategies ever revealed to students through a relatively inexpensive prep book.

The strategies presented are well worth the price of the book. While any good tutor or test prep course will impart these strategies to the student, no other preparation book features many of these strategies. The section on Reading Comprehension is the best seen thus far. The strategies are numerous and accurate, and presented in an easy to understand and memorize manner. This book was also the first one to get the Writing Skills strategies correct. The reviewers all agreed on the Writing Skills strategies and were very impressed by the breadth of the strategies in this section. The strategies and methods pertaining to the Essay were also the best these reviewers have seen thus far.

PAIR THIS BOOK WITH ANOTHER THAT HAS PRACTICE TESTS?
Maybe a solution to the issue that this book is lacking practice tests would be to pair this book with another book that has a plethora of practice tests, such as The Official SAT Study Guide or Princeton Review's 11 Practice Tests for the SAT and PSAT, 2007. This way the student benefits from the strategies in this book and from the practice tests in the other book. However, if you want a single book for SAT preparation, Barron's SAT 2400 will never suffice.

NOTE TO READER
If the reader cannot purchase this book, it is strongly recommended that she venture to a local bookstore and copy page 126 (Hierarchy of Grammar Glitches) and page 201 (Math strategies). The reader is also recommended to read the accompanying text to understand the two lists.

ISSUES
While there is ample to like about this book it does have a few drawbacks. The first is that all of the strategies may be a little too overwhelming at first. This is important because anyone can read about strategies, but it is a rare student who can effectively use theses strategies on the real exam. This then leads us to the second drawback: there are too few reinforcement problems. The main way that people learn anything is by practice, practice, and more practice. For this book to be truly effective it should feature an ample amount of reinforcement problems, but sadly it does not. While it is true that there are a fair amount of practice problems, the reviewers feel that not enough space has been devoted to reinforcement problems. Also, although it provides excellent strategies, the section on the Essay should be revised so that it is more concise and better organized.

Finally, the section on Improving Paragraphs needs to be expanded. This was the only section that received too little attention. This section also lacked "juicy" strategies. The obvious apology is that since there are only 6 Improving Paragraphs questions, how much attention should be afforded to these questions? Admittedly, the reviewers would accept such a retort, but if the reader is striving for a 2400, she probably needs to get at least 5 of the 6 Improving Paragraphs questions correct. In order to perform accordingly, she needs all the strategies that are available to her.

HUGE FONT
For some unknown reason, the font in this book is simply huge. Back in college, we would use a large font when we wanted to make the text fill up more pages (yes, we know that modifying the margins works better), but why the authors would want to fill more pages in the present case is rather mystifying. For whatever reason, they chose to use a gigantic font which makes the blocks of text that are already imposing seem even more so. Maybe they think it would make the book easier to read, but we think it has had the opposite effect.

CONCLUSION
In conclusion, if one is searching for the best strategy or "tricks" book, Barron's SAT 2400 surely fits the bill. If one is looking for a single book for SAT preparation, look elsewhere.

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