The SAT Prep Black Book(165)
Pages 49 – 56
This section explains how the College Board suggests you approach Passage-Based Reading questions. You are STRONGLY cautioned to ignore these pages—they tell you to approach the questions subjectively, which is not only bad advice but would be an invalid basis for the design of a standardized multiple-choice test.
Pages 57 – 96
These pages give you some sample questions. The first questions also have sample responses. Give these a look if you want; you might find them useful for practice.
Pages 99 – 102
These pages introduce you to the Writing Section of the SAT. Ignore them.
Pages 103 – 108
These pages explain how the College Board thinks you should approach the essay part of the SAT. Ignore them. Make sure you especially ignore the scoring manual on page 105—instead, use the advice in this book.
Pages 105 – 119
These pages provide several useless writing exercises. Do them if you feel like it, but don’t expect them to help you on the SAT at all.
Pages 130 – 136
This section provides several sample essay responses. Compare them—and the sample essay responses that appear elsewhere in the book—to the scoring guide on page 105 and decide for yourself if that guide is any real indication of what scores high on the SAT.
Pages 137 – 139
These pages introduce the Identifying Sentence Errors questions, and give you the College Board’s advice for approaching them. Some of the advice is okay, like looking for the mistakes that commonly appear on the test. But other advice is probably not that helpful. For example, you’re advised to practice by reading sentences out loud—even though acceptable spoken English and acceptable written English are pretty different, and you won’t be able to read aloud on test day.
Pages 139 – 144
These pages give you a chance to practice rewriting sentences—something you’ll NEVER do on the SAT. This is pretty much a waste of your time.
Pages 145 – 152
This section gives you some sample questions to practice on. Go for it if you want.
Pages 153 – 154
This section introduces you to the Improving Sentences questions and gives you the College Board’s advice for these questions. As usual, you can ignore it.
Pages 154 – 160
These pages have more writing exercises on them, which are pretty much a waste of time as far as the SAT is concerned. Skip them, unless you feel like doing them for some non-SAT-related fun.
Pages 161 – 168
These pages have samples for the Improving Sentences questions. Do them if you feel like it; it can’t hurt.
Pages 169 – 170
This section introduces you to the Improving Paragraphs questions. Again, it gives some pretty poor advice for these questions.
Pages 170 – 177
This section provides even more writing exercises that won’t help you do multiple-choice questions at all.
Pages 178 – 188
These pages give you sample Improving Paragraphs questions to work on. It can’t hurt to practice with them if you feel like it.
Pages 189 – 214
These pages let you practice all the question types in the SAT Writing Section. Give them a shot if you feel like it. Make sure to check out the sample essays on pages 197 – 212, and remember to compare them to the scoring guide on page 105. You’ll see that high-scoring essays have several grammatical errors, and that the most reliable way to predict an essay’s score is to see how long it is.
Pages 216 – 225
These pages introduce you to the Math Section of the SAT, and give you the College Board’s ideas about the best way to approach it. You can skip this if you feel like it.
Pages 227 – 302
These pages take you through all the mathematical concepts you’ll need for the SAT. This section is similar in content to the Math Toolbox in this book, but the Toolbox is more simplified. If you don’t understand a concept after looking at the Toolbox list, or if you just want another explanation of something, then give this section a try. Just like the Toolbox, this part of The Official SAT Study Guide contains every single math concept you’ll need on the SAT.
Pages 303 – 304
These pages explain how the College Board thinks you should approach multiple-choice questions on the SAT. Ignore this advice, especially the part on guessing (see my advice on guessing earlier in the Black Book instead).
Pages 305 – 342
This section provides sample multiple-choice questions, some with explanations. Give them a shot.
Pages 343 – 346
You MUST read these pages. They’ll explain how to fill out the grids for the Student-Produced Response questions. They’ll also remind you that it’s okay to guess on these questions, because on these questions there’s no penalty for wrong answers.