Click the "look inside" feature above to browse the SAT Black Book and get a feel for how it approaches the SAT The fully up-to-date
SAT Prep Black Book, Second Edition gives you unique, effective SAT strategies from Mike Barrett, an SAT tutor with clients all over the globe who pay him hundreds of dollars an hour for phone tutoring. In addition to extensive and effective training on every aspect of the SAT, the SAT Black Book gives you detailed, systematic, easy-to-follow walkthroughs for every question in 4 of the College Board's official SAT Practice Tests.The Black Book is a must-have in your SAT preparation, whether you need to
- make a perfect 1600 to be competitive at an Ivy,
- score a 450 in each section to claim a sports scholarship,
- or anything in between.
You can find the first 4 Practice SAT tests from the College Board for free on the College Board's website, or in the "Blue Book," which is the College Board's
Official SAT Study Guide, 2016 Edition or 2018 Edition---both editions contain the first 4 official SAT practice tests. (The SAT Prep Black Book has no affiliation with the College Board.)The Black Book and the real practice SAT tests from the College Board are all you need to get your best possible SAT score.The Black Book is the ideal SAT book for 3 major reasons:
- It covers every aspect of the test with advice that actually works, making it unique in the SAT prep field. It doesn't just review material from your high school classes Instead, you'll learn to exploit design flaws in the SAT, using its own "SAT tricks" against it.
- The Black Book contains 600+ detailed, systematic, easy-to-follow walkthroughs for real SAT questions from the College Board, so you know that what you're learning actually works. You'll see every question from the first 4 official SAT Practice Tests attacked in a way that clearly demonstrates the ideal thought process on the SAT. (You'll need your own copies of those real SAT practice tests, which you can get for free from the College Board's website. You can also find them in the College Board's 2016 or 2018 "Blue Book.")
- The Black Book is a clear, concise roadmap to the SAT. (See the selected highlights below). It explains exactly how every SAT question works, and how to beat it in the least time possible.
Selected Highlights from the SAT Prep Black Book:
- Why the SAT isn't designed like a high school test, and how this fact influences every aspect of the proper approach to SAT preparation...
- Why every SAT question can only have one valid answer, no matter how much it might seem otherwise sometimes...
- How to look at SAT questions the same way the College Board does when it writes them...
- Why it's so important to work with real SAT questions from the College Board...and why you shouldn't pay much attention to the College Board's written explanations for those questions
- What you're actually supposed to do when the SAT asks you about an author's attitude...
- Why you shouldn't put your faith in diagnostic tests, even if they come from the College Board...
- The important implications of viewing time as an investment on test day...
- The simple formula that allows you to crank out a top-scoring essay (that is, if you even need to take the SAT Essay in the first place)...
- The special grammatical rules that are followed by the SAT Writing and Language section...and how they sometimes differ from common usage in school...
- The unwritten rules for every kind of SAT question...
- The many ways to approach an SAT Math question, and which ones are likely to work best for you...
- Why the "order of difficulty" doesn't really exist...
- Why every real SAT question can potentially be answered in under 30 seconds...
- And much more than we can fit in this space...
Mike Barrett has been helping people do better on standardized tests since he was in high school. In college, he worked briefly for Kaplan but left when it became clear to him that the Kaplan method was irreconcilably different from the way he naturally thought about the test. A few months after Mike graduated from college with a degree in linguistics, his younger brothers needed help with the SAT, so he taught them his approach to the test. Word of their success spread throughout their high school, and Mike was soon offering informal SAT tutoring to a few dozen of his brothers' friends. One of those students recommended to Mike that he set up his own SAT preparation company. He thought about that for a couple of weeks and decided to pursue it. Since then, Mike has used a variety of channels to help tens of thousands of students with the SAT, PSAT, ACT, GRE, LSAT, GMAT, ISEE, and SSAT. He regularly travels to work with students all across the United States, and consults with students all over the world through Skype. He speaks at live events as well, and is available for booking. Mike's SAT strategies are so different from the traditional approach because he analyzes standardized tests from the ground up, rather than simply assuming that they cover the material they claim to cover. In other words, most SAT tutors and courses teach the same math, reading, and writing skills that you learn in high school, because they take the College Board's word then it claims that the SAT is a test of college readiness. According to Mike, SAT questions rely on very basic concepts but present them in very strange ways. So students who want to improve their test scores shouldn't waste time re-learning what they've already learned in school - instead, they should learn how the SAT actually works, so they can take their existing knowledge and leverage it into a higher score. And this is exactly what Mike teaches you to do in the SAT Prep Black Book. In addition to the extensive training, which describes how to approach every type of real SAT question on test day, the second edition of the Black Book also contains over 600 detailed walkthroughs of real SAT questions. These walkthroughs model the ideal thought process for every SAT question, and make a point of demonstrating how to apply the practical lessons from each question to what you'll see in the future on test day. If you want to understand how the SAT actually works, you need to read this book.
