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…