You're online or in the bookstore looking for test prep books for yourself or your student. There are a whole lot of books to choose from, all promising more, better, higher, guaranteed! There are even multiple editions from the same companies. So how do you choose?
First of all, the best first course of action is to purchase practice books from the test makers themselves. They are the ones labelled "Official". Not only are they going to be the closest, ie identical, to the actual test, they can be the best value (I saw the SAT practice book for 9 dollars on Amazon the other day), since they print all the tests in the book rather than simply providing codes to online tests.
In fact, it's easy to find the official SAT practice tests online for free nowadays. The same SAT tests you'll find in the big blue book are also available free here. If you go the online route, you must print the tests out! That will give your student a practice experience that most closely resembles the real test, as your student can write on the test, which is an important part of optimal test-taking strategy.
The ACT makers are stingier, providing only one official test online for free, and you have to register with their website to get it. So with that one, you'll likely be going the book-purchase route.
You can also find a lot of released tests on Reddit. These are tests previous students took, and when they signed up they opted to receive a copy of the test afterwards, which they then put on the internet. Interestingly, the test makers have not curbed this behavior, and there are dozens of each test available.
Given these options, there is really no reason to go outside the official test makers for practice tests. That whole third-party industry could just die off considering what is available to students today. And I wouldn't mind if they did, considering two factors:
1, Practice tests made by third party companies might not even be good tests.
There is no way to tell how accurately a third party test approximates the real one. While the official test makers use a lot of public domain literature passages, the questions are copyright protected. So what you tend to get from third party tests is the same passages with different questions. The questions might not be as well written as the originals, and if you have a student who already burned through the official tests, they will be encountering the same passages, which will water down the difficulty because they've seen the reading material before.
2, They can be shady about what they're putting in the book and what they're charging you.
For example, here are two ACT test prep books by the same maker, Princeton Review. The one on the left is $33 and the one on the right is $20.
What's the difference? Literally nothing in the actual book. They have the same number of pages and the same information. Note that each book only provides 4 paper tests, with additional online tests. The so-called Platinum Edition simply gives you access to two additional online tests. From my experience, students don't use the online resources, and since online tests don't mimic the real test format, they are not the best practice kids can get anyway, so save yourself the $13.
My advice on buying test prep books, if you MUST buy one from a third party, is look at the fine print on the front cover and make sure that all the tests the book cover is proclaiming it contains are actually in the book and not online or on cd. Also, just go for the books that have the most tests in them and not a bunch of teaching material because the kids don't look at that either.
There are also test prep books that focus on teaching strategies, not providing entire practice tests. That's a whole other category of test prep books which I have less experience with, though from what I've seen I haven't been impressed. Maybe that's because I am a test prep strategy resource myself...none of them do it exactly like I would so I'm hard to please.
My recommendation is take advantage of the low prices and free material from the actual test makers, and use me to teach the strategies in conjunction with the tests. I teach group classes and one-on-one!
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