CEEAE's Review of Up Your Score...

FULL REVIEW
THE BEST "STRATEGY ONLY" BOOK
There is no doubt that this is the best strategy book for most students. It is extremely easy to read and could even be considered entertaining. This book's comical writing style makes for an easy read as well as greater retention of material and strategies. Numerous pop culture references abound in the text. The author's effective use of pop culture references and humor make this one of the easiest preparation books to read. In fact, students will likely regard reading this book as somewhat fun, which is strict diametric oppostion to the typically torturous character of SAT preparation.

There were four tutors in the room when this review was being composed and all four stated that they agreed with the methods and strategies in this book, and wished that their lessons could be as entertaining. Admittedly they had a couple of reservations about the strategies in this book, but we will get to those in the next section.

This book starts out with an exposition of the SAT and then the authors comically attack both the SAT (Slimy and Atrocious Torture) and the ETS (Evil Testing Serpent). They then consider some of the general aspects of the SAT. Then they turn to Critical Reading, Math, and Writing Skills and the Essay. Throughout these sections whenever the text gets a little tiring or dry, humor is immediately interjected. This makes for an entertaining read from beginning to end. Humor is always best when unexpected and certainly no one would expect pervasive humor in an SAT preparation book, hence it is not only entertaining but also effective.

ERRORS & OMISSIONS
This is not a perfect book. It does have a few errors and it does not feature as compendium of strategies like some other strategy books, but what it seeks to convey it does in spades.

There are a couple of minor errors in the mathematics material review. For example, on page 198, the first cubic binomials listed should read "x^3 + y^3" instead of "x^3 - y^3". It is rather obvious since the same binomial is listed twice but with different formulas. Just five pages later, a quadratic problem is given but the solution has the factors' signs flipped.

NO ADVANCED STRATEGIES
Another note, there are other strategy books which present more strategies and provide an ample amount of reinforcement problems. However, they are not nearly as easy to read (dare we say fun?) as Up Your Score. If you need advanced strategies and a plethora of them, this is not the book for you. One solution may be to use Up Your Score for your review of initial and general strategies and then utilize another book such as Kaplan's 2400 or Barron's 2400 for the more advanced strategies and reinforcement problems.

IMPORTANT NOTE: DO NOT USE THEIR BUBBLING METHODS!
The only major quarrel we have with this book is the "Intrepid Point Method" or "Straight-Line Method" of bubbling answers onto the answer sheet. Even on their own website, students have complained about using this technique, and having their score ruined because the machine scoring the exam were unable to detect the small markings. This issue simply must be addressed since this book is superior in many aspects, but this one method can kill all of student's hard preparation.

Not only does the method make little sense intuitively, but we now have empirical evidence that this method is ineffective, and may ruin a student's test score. What happens if a student uses either of these methods? If the student uses one of these methods and receives a score that she feels is in error, then she will need to have her test hand graded. Hand grading costs extra and will take much longer for the scores to be recorded and later reported to schools. This is not rreally a problem for juniors, but seniors' applications will definitely be negatively affected.

CONCLUSION
In conclusion, this book is easiest strategy book to read, which makes it a strong choice for the vast majority of students. Most students will purchase a thick tome and think that they will do a chapter a week and, big surprise, they have only completed a few of the beginning chapters as test time approaches. The entertaining wrting style found in Up Your Score will likely enable the vast majority of students to complete the book and learn quite a lot in the process. There are some drawbacks to this book though. The most significant is the proven problematic bubbling method presented. Also, there are other books that present more strategies and reinforcement problems. Overall, this easy to read book is a great choice for the vast majority of students.

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