I am a teacher at a private high school and had used Gruber's New SAT book for a four week SAT preparation course with 28 students. All students took the March 2005 SAT and the course was in preparation for the June 2005 SAT. When we tabulated the scores for the June 2005 SAT we were thrilled that the average increase in the math was 120 points, the verbal, 100 points and the writing 110 points. Some students increased more than 600 points total. Although students were attentive in class, and although I believe I am a good teacher, I know that the students could not have achieved such great results without Gruber's book.

This books is rather difficult to review.
There are plenty of hard math problems that really don't appear in the math portion of the SATs, and there aren't that many verbal practice problems. The book is very thick, but don't let that trick you. Most of the book is explaining like the concepts of math, or vocab quizzes that consume a lot of the book, examples of the verbal/reading comp questions that will appear in the SATs, and a long (as in lots of pages) grammar review.

It's thorough in explanations, but there aren't very many questions to solve, except for math (except hard, not found in the real SATs), lots of vocab quizzes, and 5 practice tests in the back. However, if want to sit and read through all of the "strategies" and math concepts and the grammar usage things, then by all means, you should purchase this book.

I knew that the Gruber SAT books for the old SAT were great, so I purchased this book when I saw it in the bookstore. I haven't gone through it in depth, but it seems to be one of the best SAT books for the new version. It has a lot of helpful features like the "101 Most Important Math Questions You Need to Know How to Solve" and a very thorough "Math Refresher" that will definitely raise your score. The word list is great, as the definitions are very concise and easy to remember. The 5 practice tests seem to be very realistic. The grammar review is phenomenal. It goes over basically all the grammar one could possibly need to know for the SAT, and it also seems to contain some extraneous information that will be very helpful for a high school English class. For some reason, my high school teaches no grammar, so I need all the practice that I can get for the writing section. This is probably one of the best SAT books for actually learning the material. The Kaplan and Princeton Review books won't help you learn a lot, though they will provide you with a lot of practice. The three best books for the new SAT are, in my opinion, McGraw Hill's SAT I, Barron's How to Prepare for the New SAT, and this one. They are also quite thorough, and you don't need to purchase more than 1 or possibly 2 of the 3 to be well-prepared for the test. Good luck :)