Click the link above to see the fully up-to-date second edition of the SAT Prep Black Book for advice on the current version of the SAT, along with over 600 detailed walkthroughs of real SAT questions from the College Board!
Click the "look inside" feature above to browse the Black Book and get a feel for how it approaches the SAT!
The "SAT Prep Black Book" 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. The Black Book is a must-have, whether you need to
- make a perfect 2400 to be competitive at an Ivy,
- score a 450 in each section to claim a sports scholarship,
- or anything in between.
The Black Book works best when used with the authentic SAT questions in the "Blue Book," which is the College Board's Official SAT Study Guide. The Black Book shows you how to beat the SAT, while the Blue Book gives you real SAT questions to practice with. (The SAT Prep Black Book has no affiliation with the College Board.)
The Black Book and the Blue Book are all you need to get your best possible SAT score.
The Black Book is the ideal SAT book for 3 major reasons:
- It actually works, making it unique in the SAT prep field. There are no lists of "SAT vocab" to memorize or anything like that. Instead, you'll exploit design flaws in the SAT, using its own "SAT tricks" against it.
- The Black Book contains 250+ solutions for real SAT questions from the Blue Book, so you know it actually works. (You'll need the 2nd edition of the Blue Book to use these solutions.)
- The Black Book is a clear, concise roadmap to the SAT. (See the table of contents below). It explains exactly how every SAT question works, and how to beat it in the least time possible.
Click the "look inside" feature above to browse the Black Book and get a feel for how it approaches the SAT!
SAT Book Table Of Contents (Selected)
Be sure to check the "look inside" feature above. Here's a selection from the table of contents:
- F.A.Q.?
- Setting (the right) goals
- How to train for the SAT: mastering the ideas in this book
- Only work with SAT questions from the College Board!
- A word on SAT guessing: Don't
- How to avoid "careless errors"
- Where to find "missing points"
- Time management
- The SAT's big secret
- SAT Passage-Based Reading
- The big secret of SAT Reading
- . . .
- SAT Sentence Completion
- 5 reasons memorizing vocabulary isn't the best idea
- What if we don't know enough words?
- . . .
- SAT Math
- The big secret of SAT Math
- The 2 critical components of SAT Math success
- . . .
- The SAT Essay
- . . .
- SAT Writing multiple-choice
- How to improve on the Writing section
- . . .
- Being an SAT machine
- 8 things you thought you knew about the SAT are wrong
- The nature of elite scores
- Advice for non-native English speakers
- A final piece of advice
Click the "look inside" feature above to browse the Black Book and get a feel for how it approaches the SAT!
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. But Mike has looked carefully at large numbers of real SAT questions, and has determined that they have almost no similarity at all to the kinds of questions that teachers ask in school. 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. If you want to understand how the SAT actually works, you need to read this book.
