Another great punctuation review for the ACT!

Up until now my favorite ACT punctuation review was Barron's ACT 36.  However, I have another favorite!  I am in the process of reviewing Up Your Score ACT: The Underground Guide.  I haven't finished it, yet, so stay tuned for the full review. However, I have reached the punctuation review in chapter 4, and it's pretty good.  The ACT 36 review is more thorough, but the Up Your Score ACT review is funnier and easier to remember.

If you really struggle with punctuation questions, choose the Up Your Score review.  If you are trying to get those last few questions for a perfect English score, go with the ACT 36 review.

A while back I wrote a full review of Barron's ACT 36 which you can read here.  I recommended that you borrow a copy for the punctuation review rather than buy the whole thing.  

Study Materials Review: SAT 2400 in Just 7 Steps (Take 2)

Do you think your life will not be complete unless you score a 2400 on the SAT?  Is your score currently 600 points short of that goal? Do you have over 100 hours to spend on this project?  Are you the type of student who likes to index and color-code his class notes?  This is the book for you.

The author, Shaan Patel, spent countless hours working to raise his score from a 1700 to a perfect 2400. In this book he shares the technique he used with the reader.

The book is methodical and I have no doubt that it could get results promised when used as directed. However, I will not be using it with my students because it does not share my general approach to the SAT.  The book describes a very methodical, time-consuming approach that builds competence gradually in small, steady increments.  Over (a LOT) of time, the test-taker’s score improves by a substantial margin.

As I pointed out in a previous post, you can get a lot done in over 100 hours.  Surely you can find a more meaningful project -and one more attractive to college admissions officers- than studying for the SAT. To give you some perspective, consider:  once your first college semester is under your belt, no one will care about your SAT score ever again.  By the time you are 25 or 30 you, yourself, may not remember what you scored. It occurs to me that Mr. Patel may have chosen to write this book so that his accomplishment would continue to mean something.  It would be depressing to spend that much time on a project only to have it be unnoticed and forgotten. A book and a test-prep course would be just the thing to make all that effort worthwhile.

The overall approach to preparing for the SAT is not unique to this book. The advice is to methodically take simulated SAT tests then pore over the questions missed and make notes on what to do better the next time.  To focus these efforts, the book lists a total of 60 strategies.  There are problems available to practice these strategies along with 500 vocabulary words to memorize. Five of the strategies are for memorizing the vocabulary words.  None of the strategies were particularly creative or groundbreaking.

While the strategies and advice may not be original, I will say that this book is unique among the ones I have seen in the 2400 market.  Gruber’s 2400 and Barron’s 2400 both seem to have trouble deciding if they are stand-alone books or supplements to the general SAT books published by those same companies. SAT 2400 in Just 7 Steps is intended to be used with the Official College Board SAT book, but it will take you from knowing nothing about the SAT to acing the test.

Study Material Review: Barron's ACT 36

My idea of an ideal ACT 36 book is one that accomplishes two things:

1. Discusses how to answer the most difficult ACT questions and gives plenty of practice for each type.
2.  Shows the student how to save time on the easier portions of the test so that there will be enough time to work on the most difficult questions.

Barron's ACT 36 does neither of these things.  In particular, there are not nearly enough practice problems. 

Study material review: Barron's ACT flashcards

Save your money.  Pass up Barron's ACT flashcards.

It looks impressive from the outside.  There are 400 cards in a sturdy box "to help you achieve a higher score."  Your first clue that this may not be worth the $17 is the statement, "A great study aid when used in tandem with Barron's ACT test pep guide,..." It reminds me of reading the cereal box and seeing, "healthy as part of a complete breakfast" and then a photo showing an enormous breakfast that would be even healthier if you left out the cereal.

The problem is that they didn't make very good decisions regarding what to put on the cards. Typically one would want to have flashcards of definitions or formulas. There are plenty of candidates for ACT study. However, the vast majority of these cards are either "strategies" or multiple choice questions with the correct answer on the other side.

For example, the math section comprises about 1/3 of the deck. First, it's hard to imagine what one would put on over 100 flashcards (the deck I've made for my students has about 40). Still, the ACT expects you to know quite a number of algebra and geometry formulas. Unfortunately, there are no "formulas" cards. There are a few formulas included in the "strategies" cards, but the formula is given on the front of the card along with a specific problem that uses the formula. It is the answer to the problem that appears on the reverse of the card.

In short, the only really nice thing about this flashcard deck is the box it came in.