Kaplan SAT 2012: Strategies, Practice, and Review

At 684 pages, Kaplan SAT 2012: Strategies, Practice, and Review is not the most dense SAT prep book, but it is one of the most popular among American students looking to improve their SAT test acumen. Kaplan SAT 2012 is educational expert Kaplan's essential SAT study guide. Kaplan SAT 2012 is the newest edition of Kaplan's SAT prep material, containing all sorts of tool to help students prepare for the latest version of the SAT exam. Like other SAT test prep books, this book contains test-taking strategies, practical tools for working out answers in all three sections of the test, and is written in the simplest terms possible.

Kaplan SAT 2012: Strategies, Practice, and Review contains four full-length SAT practice tests as well as an additional full-length practice SAT test online with a password. The book also offers SAT test creator's tips and test-taking tactics developed by Kaplan's team of high-scoring SAT teachers. An interesting addition to Kaplan SAT 2012 are the "Strategy shoutouts" inserted occasionally throughout the book, written by a former Kaplan student who scored a perfect 2400 on the SAT test a few years ago. No other SAT strategy guide has this unique feature, and students are more likely to identify with someone their age who recently aced the test.

Kaplan SAT 2012 contains hundreds of practice questions outside of the five complete SAT practice tests--these additional questions contain an answer key and (even more valuable) a short but detailed explanation of how you reach each answer. This is particularly helpful on the mathematics section. Kaplan SAT 2012 is one of a handful of SAT prep books that offer a guide to parents of students taking the SAT, allowing parents to get involved in their student's study sessions.

More on Kaplan SAT 2012: Strategies, Practice, and Review

The Kaplan SAT 2012 study guide is published by Kaplan, an educational service that has helped over three million students prepare for various standardized tests, including the SAT and PSAT. Kaplan has been coaching students preparing for standardized testing for 70 years, and Kaplan SAT 2012 was designed with all those years of experience teaching real students. Kaplan's practice SAT tests are very similar to actual SAT tests, right down to the font that the practice tests are written in. Kaplan SAT 2012: Strategies, Practice, and Review will set you back about $20 at a bookstore, though you can find discount versions at online retailers.

Kaplan gets a few things right with the most recent edition of their SAT prep guide--namely, they include math questions that are more similar to actual SAT math problems than other similar SAT prep books. Adding detailed explanations of how students should arrive at the correct answer to math problems is more helpful than just printing the correct answer and hoping students know how to come to that solution on their own.

Unfortunately, the section on Critical Reading and Writing is not as thorough. The reading passages included in practice tests and review materials are not as difficult as passages students will actually face on the SAT. Boosting student's confidence with easier passages may help them avoid some of the stress associated with SAT testing, but it won't really prepare them for the Critical Reading section of the SAT. Kaplan SAT 2012's section containing advice for the essay portion of the test is dull and poorly-written, so that you'd have to combine the Kaplan guide with another SAT test prep book to properly prepare a student for their SAT exam.

Kaplan has the experience and the name-recognition necessary to put together a good SAT study guide, but they've come up short in some portions of their recent edition of SAT 2012. Students using the book for SAT prep have reported that some recently printed editions even include typos and math errors, an oversight that Kaplan should address before the next edition of the book. The Kaplan SAT 2012: Strategies, Practice, and Review book is not by any means the worst SAT prep book on the market, but it doesn't compete with more robust study guides from The College Board or Princeton Review.