McGraw-Hill's 12 SAT Practice Tests with PSAT, 2nd edition PDF
Preview McGraw-Hill's 12 SAT Practice Tests with PSAT, 2nd edition
McGRAW–HILL’S 12 SAT PRACTICE TESTS AND PSAT SECOND EDITION CHRISTOPHER BLACK MARK ANESTIS and the TUTORS of COLLEGE HILL COACHING™ McGraw-Hill NEWYORK / CHICAGO /SAN FRANCISCO / LISBON / LONDON / MADRID / MEXICO CITY MILAN / NEW DELHI / SAN JUAN / SEOUL / SINGAPORE / SYDNEY / TORONTO ✓ Copyright © 2008, 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. 0-07-158318-1 The material in this eBook also appears in the print version of this title: 0-07-158317-3. All trademarks are trademarks of their respective owners. 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If you’d like more information about this book, its author, or related books and websites, please click here. ABOUT THE AUTHORS Christopher Black, M.A.is the founder and director of College Hill Coaching. He has been a consultant to the nation’s leading educa- tional publishers and software developers and is coauthor of McGraw-Hill’s SAT. Mark Anestisis the founder and director of The Learning Edge and coauthor of McGraw-Hill’s SAT. Copyright © 2008, 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Click here for terms of use. This page intentionally left blank For more information about this title, click here CONTENTS CHAPTER 1 What You Need to Know About the New SAT 1 CHAPTER 2 The College Hill Method 6 CHAPTER 3 Attacking the SAT Essay 16 Practice Test 1 19 Practice Test 2 85 Practice Test 3 153 Practice Test 4 223 Practice Test 5 295 Practice Test 6 358 Practice Test 7 425 Practice Test 8 489 Practice Test 9 557 Practice Test 10 619 vi CONTENTS Practice Test 11 684 Practice Test 12 748 Practice PSAT 815 CHAPTER 1 WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT THE NEW SAT Important Questions About a Tough Test ✓ 11 Copyright © 2008, 2007 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. Click here for terms of use. 2 McGRAW-HILL’S 12 SAT PRACTICE TESTS AND PSAT Why do colleges need to see my SAT the truly good thinkers. Rather than predicting your scores? Aren’t my grades and SAT Subject grades, your SAT scores indicate your ability to read Test scores enough? critically, write cogently, solve math problems intelli- gently, and think under pressure. Thankfully, the Many colleges use your SAT scores to help them SAT is not designed to predict how well you’ll play assess your readiness to do tough college work. the college grading game. Although the SAT does not assess broad subject knowledge, it provides a universal benchmark that Doesn’t the SAT just measure your high school transcript can’t. It assess skills that “test-taking skills”? are essential to success in a competitive liberal-arts college: written argumentation, critical reading, and Although many large SAT-prep franchises try to con- mathematical analysis. vince students that taking the SAT has nothing to do Competitive colleges need the SAT because course with real academic skills, and that it’s all about apply- grades are, unfortunately, far from objective measures ing their test-taking “secrets,” most of this is just of your academic ability. Teachers rarely give out hype. In fact the only way to see dramatic score grades consistently and without bias. We all know improvements on the SAT is through smart practice that every school has easy graders and hard graders. in the reasoning skills at the core of the SAT. Real Also, many teachers occasionally inflate or deflate success on the SAT takes hard work and the right grades for reasons unrelated to intellectual ability, like attitude. Treating the SAT like a joke is definitely not “effort” or personal preference. Even when objective the right attitude. standards are used, they vary widely from teacher to The SAT isn’t written by a monopoly of sadists teacher and school to school. Achievement tests like AP who hate students and want to make college admis- exams and SAT Subject Tests are more objective, but sions as arduous as possible. The Educational Testing they are designed to assess subject knowledge, which Service (ETS) writes the SAT at the request of the can be easily forgotten, rather than basic reasoning College Board, a nonprofit association of over 4,200 skills, which determine broader academic ability. colleges whose goal is to promote high academic Subject knowledge is effective only when it is incorpo- standards for students. More than likely, any college rated into a meaningful and robust way of solving you apply to will be a member of the College Board. problems. The SAT, although not perfect, does a good The ETS changes the format and content of the job of measuring how well you reason under pressure, SAT from time to time, based on the needs of the an important academic and life skill. member colleges and universities. For instance, in SAT-bashing has been a very popular pastime in 2002, educators at the University of California, the last 25 years or so, largely due to the “crack-the- unhappy with the writing skills of their incoming test” SAT-prep franchises. Very few of their arguments freshmen, suggested that the SAT incorporate an against the SAT, however, hold any water. The fact is essay and eleminate some of the more “artificial” that more students take the SAT every year, and more vocabulary-based questions so that it would better colleges—not fewer—rely on the SAT every year. reflect actual college work. After much research, the ETS changed the SAT accordingly, and the Doesn’t the SAT do a poor job of predicting most recent version of the SAT was implemented in first-year college grades? 2005. SAT-bashers have long liked to claim that the SAT Why does so much ride on just one test? isn’t valuable to colleges because it doesn’t predict college grades very well. They miss two important It may seem unfair that a 41⁄ hour test is so impor- 2 points: first, smart college admissions officers don’t tant. Remember, though, that the SAT is not a one- want it to predict grades, and second, it correlates shot, all-or-nothing affair. Your standardized test very well with something more important than scores account for only about 1⁄ to 1⁄ of your college 5 3 grades—real success in academic fields like law, application, depending on where you apply. The other medicine, and the like. essential components include your grades, your cur- As we just discussed, predicting grades is a wild- riculum, your essay, your recommendations, your goose chase because grades are not objectively distrib- special talents, and your extracurricular activities. uted: most any teacher can give out grades any way he Also, you can take the SAT many times, and colleges or she wishes. Many students, as we all know, get will consider only the top individual scores from all good grades without having great intellectual ability. of your tests. In other words, if you take the SAT They just learn to “play the game” of school—seek the twice, and get scores of 460 Critical Reading, 530 easy “A”s, suck up to teachers, and pad their transcripts. Math and 500 Writing on the first test, and 540 Smart college admissions officers like the SAT Critical Reading, and 490 Math and 400 Writing on because it often weeds the grade-grubbers out from the second test, then your score is, for all practical
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