Barron's SAT Critical Reading Workbook (Critical Reading Workbook for the Sat)

I used Baron's for the SAT Math Subject Test and it was great. However, for the reading Baron's was terrible. My main issue with this book is that the questions in the practice tests ARE NOT similar to the questions you will actually see on the test. Most books especially Collegeboard's have acurate questions. However, this book had styles of reading comprehension questions that I had not seen in a dozen practice tests. Baron's had a lot of "pretty general" questions that would ask about details from a group of paragraphs. I had never seen this sort of question. Baron's asks a lot of these. Other practice tests that I have seen had a lot of questions asking about main ideas, tone of the passage, comparing passages, and specific detail questions (citing specific lines). Baron's had a few of these questions types, but definitely not as many as on other tests. My point is that Baron's may make you a better critical reader through these exercises, BUT it will not prepare you well for the types of questions you will see on the SAT reading test. There were also a lot of typos in the book. Lastly, the sentence completion questions were alright and the vocabulary lists were good. However, this does not make up for the inadequate reading passage questions.

I bought this book for my daughter to prep for the PSAT and Act and she said of all the study materials she had, this was the best book ever! It not only explained the answers throughly but it was challanging and had materials that were very much related to these tests.

I teach SAT prep/review classes independently, and have been using the Barron's workbook for several years. The material is challenging, and provides students with a large number of high-frequency SAT words used in context. The vocabulary lists, root origins of words, and practice tests are all excellent.
Kate Connors,
Holliston MA

I get 200 point more at self SAT exam,after I did all problems in this book.

Obviously, this book can not be your only guide to the SAT;it only covers a third of it. But it does a very thorough job with the Critical Reading section. The sentence completion practice tests (4 tests per set, 3 different difficulty level sets) are very close to the real College Board ones. The reading comprehension pieces are decent; nothing amazing, but as good as close to the real SAT as you can find.

The most valuable part of this book (for the average person), is the comprehensive vocabulary list. It consists of 800 words (80 sets of 10 words). Being very familiar with the actual SAT, I can say that the words on the list are indeed very high-frequency SAT words. If you know every word on that list it would be hard to answer more than 2 sentence completion questions incorrectly on the real SAT. For the vocabulary list alone, the book is worth the buy.