CEEAE's Review of Cliffs TestPrep NEW SAT

Prep. Book Reviews

Cliffs TestPrep - The NEW SAT
(3rd edition)
1/13/06 - Composite Review

REVIEW SUMMARY
CONCLUSION
Difficult to recommend. Brief but lacking in some places. Great test questions, but error-ridden test format.

THE GOOD
-- Concise treatment of the subject material
-- Easy to read
-- Excellent test questions - very similar to actual SAT

THE BAD
-- Horribly flawed practice test format
-- Subject material coverage may not be comprehensive
enough for some students
-- Lacks "juicy" test taking strategies
-- Essay questions were inconsistent with those on the
actual SAT

FULL REVIEW
INAUSPICIOUS BEGINNING
This book "rubbed us the wrong way" from the very beginning. The cover features the author's name followed by "Award Winning Educator and Author". That's great but which awards? Golden Globes? Peabody? Sounded like BS to us. Then at the bottom of the cover it states that this book is "Used in university and college programs". Perhaps it is, but why would we care whether students in college are using this book? Perhaps this line is meant to convey that many college and universities have test preparation programs that trade on the university's or college's name and reputation. We know that most of those programs have little to do with the actual college or university. Usually the only association is geographic: the classes are held on the college campus. So bragging about being used in a prep program that just happens to be held on a college campus tells us little about the utility of the program. Anyway...

BREVITY IS A VIRTUE?
This book is rather brief; there are only 125 pages of test strategies and preparation. The strategies presented are very good and no one would disagree with them, but they are not very "juicy". Many of these strategies are obvious to a seasoned test-taker. The strategies are, however, presented in a very palatable context, so they should be easy to recall and use on the test. Our main complaint is that there is not enough review of the material. If a student has forgotten an area or areas of a particular subject, Cliffs TestPrep is not an appropriate book. Also, more practice problems and reinforcement is needed to solidfy understanding of subject areas germain to the SAT.

PRACTICE TESTS - WTF?
Essay prompts were inconsistent with those on actual SATs. The essay prompts were not unlike those on other standardized tests, so maybe this book needs a quick update to rectify this discrepancy. Further the Writing Skills sections were not formatted correctly. For example on the real SAT, the 35-question Writing Skills section consists of 11 improving sentencess, 18 identifying errors, and 6 improving paragraphs, but on the practice tests in Cliffs TestPrep there were 7 improving sentences, 19 identifying errors, and 9 improving paragraphs. Not a big difference, but still wrong. On the real SAT, the 25 minute Critical Reading sections consist of 24 questions, Cliffs TestPrep had 28 or 27 questions, depending on the test. This is not the end to the plethora of errors on the practice tests, but we don't want to waste your time with a complete explanation of the errors. The important thing to remember here is that the questions themselves are very accurate to the real SAT, but the practice test format is horribly inaccurate.

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