The Best ACT and SAT Prep Books: A Comprehensive Comparison

With the ever-evolving landscape of college admissions, standardized tests like the ACT and SAT remain significant factors, often influencing merit-based scholarships and admission decisions. The SAT and ACT exams are constantly on high school students’ minds. Whether they’re taking it for the first time to get their baseline score or trying to get high SAT scores, getting proper prep materials is a great investment. Studying and preparing for the SAT and ACT can make a huge difference in your scores. Luckily, a plethora of prep books are available to help students prepare. Finding the best SAT and ACT prep books for your needs is a game-changer for your scores.

This article provides a detailed comparison of some of the best ACT and SAT prep books available, catering to diverse learning styles and needs.

Why Invest in Prep Books?

While standardized tests aren't always required for college admission, they offer a valuable opportunity to secure merit-based scholarships. Prep books provide a structured approach to studying, offering comprehensive content review, practice questions, and test-taking strategies. These resources familiarize students with the exam format and question types, enabling them to tailor their preparation to individual needs and learning styles.

Factors to Consider When Choosing Prep Books

Selecting the right prep books requires careful consideration of several factors:

Content Coverage: Ensure the book covers all sections of the exam (Reading, Writing and Language, Math, and Science for the ACT). Comprehensive coverage ensures a well-rounded understanding of the tested concepts and skills.
Practice Materials: Ample practice questions and full-length practice tests are crucial for familiarizing yourself with the exam format and identifying areas needing improvement.
Test-Taking Strategies: Effective strategies for approaching different question types, managing time, and optimizing performance are essential components of a good prep book.
Reputation and Reviews: Consider the book's reputation and reviews from educators, tutors, and students. Positive feedback indicates a high-quality resource.

Top ACT Prep Books

Official ACT Prep Guide

This ACT prep book takes our number one spot as an ACT prep resource because it’s written by the ACT themselves! Who knows how to better prepare the students than the test givers? We love this ACT prep book because it comes with practice tips and strategies in all the subjects. It covers English, math, reading, and science, and even has optional writing portions for you to use.

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The tests in the Official ACT Prep Guide are real former ACT tests. The main differences between the 2020 and 2021 versions is the addition of a diagnostic exam at the end of chapter three. Other than that the other 5 tests are almost identical to the 5 exams in the 2020 edition.

Kaplan ACT Prep Plus

Kaplan has great test guides and prep books for you to use throughout your high school and college career. Their ACT Prep Plus 2023 book has a total of five full-length practice tests, hundreds of practice questions, and a year of access to online quizzes and video instructions. Plus, the online materials like scoring, analysis, and explanations allow you to see where you made mistakes. It’s an overall great option, especially if you’re using it to increase your score as they have a higher score guarantee.

Just like the 2018 edition, the best part of Kaplan’s ACT Prep Plus 2021 book is its structure. It lays out ACT content, question types, skills, and strategies in a complete and straightforward way.

The answer explanations in Kaplan’s ACT Prep Plus 2021 are refreshing in many ways. Unlike many ACT books, this book explains both the right answers and the wrong answers! The strategy and skill portions of the book definitely don’t have a problem with incompleteness. Here, you get in-depth descriptions of all of the different kinds of questions in each section. There’s also a thorough overview of the major grammar rules and math principles on the exam.

The ACT Black Book

If you don’t struggle with the concepts and material, your mindset may be holding you back from getting the score you want. With this ACT prep book, you’ll go over how to change your mindset while you’re taking a test so you can tap into all the information you have stored in your brain and make the test go more smoothly. It comes with over 200 questions and has the answers explained. Plus, it also has tips and strategies for you to learn!

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Yes, the Red Book gives you answer explanations, but the Black Book gives you strategic advice on how to answer them: which questions should be back-solved using the answer choices, for example, or how to use the English section answer choices to find the right answer without needing to understand the grammar.

ACT Prep Book for a 36

Written by a famous ACT tutor, this ACT prep book says it gives you the must-haves for scoring a 36 so that you can get into an Ivy League college and for scoring a 10 to ensure a sports scholarship. Either way, it has over 600 test questions, a roadmap of the ACT, and formatting secrets about the test.

Princeton Review ACT Premium Prep

Like Kaplan, The Princeton Review helps thousands of students each year prepare for standardized tests. There’s a reason they are household names when it comes to taking the ACT. This test prep book has six practice tests, content reviews, and strategies to help you get a high score the next time you take the test.

The ACT Reading advice is pretty good, although the text is heavily stamped with Princeton Review’s branding in the form of specialized terms and acronyms. But-just like previous years’ editions-the added ACT Reading practice questions themselves are abysmally not ACT-like. Most of the new dual passage questions are far too easy, and the “hard” questions are only hard because the answer choices are ambiguous. Supposedly “wrong” answers could be right.

One good update this year is that the Princeton Review has made some steps towards covering prewriting, a step it previously ignored. The advice about the new ACT essay is good in some respects. However, once again some branding creeps in. PR gives a pretty strict template for writing the essay, specifying phrases, the structure of individual paragraphs, and the order of content. This Princeton Review method for this essay isn’t bad per se. But it may not work for everyone.

Barron's ACT

As Kristin mentioned in her review of the first edition of Barron’s ACT, this book is one of the more useful unofficial ACT guides on the market. But was Barron’s able to maintain this quality and build on it in Barron’s ACT, 4th Edition?

As in previous editions, Barron’s does a good job of capturing the basic format and “flavor” of real ACT practice materials. But once more, most of the practice questions are easier than the real test. The ACT Writing prompts are top-notice, and there are multiple score sample essays for each question. The ACT English questions are a little too easy on average and largely unchanged from past editions. ACT Reading questions are mostly the same and a little bit too easy.

The start of the book gives a thorough account of what the ACT is and what it contains. The sections of strategy advice for ACT English, Math, Reading, and Science are near-identical to the material in the previous version, all of which was excellent. Still, this lack of change makes the new Barron’s ACT book a not-so-appealing option if you already have the last edition. The ACT Writing portion of the book is fully updated. This completely new content is really amazing, and it includes some extra practice questions and sample responses, with scorer commentary.

Ivy Global ACT Guide

Ivy Global is a less well-known name for test prep, but they continue to produce high-quality practice materials that are worth your attention. While they’re more commonly known in the realm of SAT prep, they came out with an ACT guide in 2019 that is very good. Ivy Global’s style is minimal and no-nonsense. It is a real breath of fresh air after other test prep books with a more cluttered and energetic style or format 🙂 They offer a clear and concise introduction to the test and test taking strategies that are easy to understand. Their section-specific review is great. Not exactly enough to teach you a topic you’ve never seen before, but definitely enough to help you refresh or fill in any gaps. The book offers three practice tests, and these are a good representation of the topics and difficulty on the real test. There are also free practice tests available to anyone on the Ivy Global site. It’s important to note that full answer explanations are available on the site only, which isn’t a huge deal, but does add an extra step.

Manhattan 5 lb. Book of ACT Practice Problems

Manhattan’s ACT Math questions are excellent. They are 100% consistent with ones you’ll see on the real SAT, and follow the same format and difficulty. The ACT Reading and English are definitely ACT-like, but the sections as a whole are a little easier than the real thing. That’s because the real ACT will test you on more than one skill on each question, such as knowledge of vocabulary and literary devices. Manhattan has a little too many one-skill prompts, which makes the sections easier on average. There are two other small issues. First, Manhattan uses “EXCEPT questions,” where you need to identify the one idea that is not in the passage. This is common in ACT Reading but not in ACT Science. Second, there are some pre-algebra math operations that wouldn’t occur outside of ACT Math.

Each answer explanation really acts as a mini-lesson on academic content, and this allows you to walk away with knowledge that’s applicable to other similar ACT questions. As an added bonus, questions in this book are organized by subject. There is a potential shortcoming, though. Unlike the current official ACT Guide, Manhattan’s explanations don’t directly address incorrect answers.

Barron's ACT 36

Barron’s offers a smaller, more targeted book called ACT 36. Barron’s 36 has always been unusually short by test prep standards. This book is designed as a short introductory course for the ACT. Key ideas and small sets of practice questions are much more clearly marked than before. Certain content has been slightly re-ordered so that the organization of each chapter is more logical.

In its 4th edition, Barron’s ACT remains a very basic book. The book makes for a good introductory warm-up before you move on to longer, more advanced prep books. I may recommend this as a source for students hoping to break into the 30s because they can still practice problem solving strategies and time and stress management. They’ll just need to make sure that they use other sources of questions as well to make sure that they give themselves time to get used to the full range of difficulty.

McGraw-Hill's 10 ACT Practice Tests

Past reviews have observed that the 2018 book was better than the 2014 version of their book, 10 ACT Practice Tests, though it still had flaws. The 2021 edition is a little bit better, but like its predecessors, isn’t perfect. The 2021 edition includes a short section about the new updates to the ACT test. These updates include the shift to online exams, the retakes of individual sections and the new superscoring policy.

McGraw-Hill’s ACT 2021 offers four print practice tests and access to four more practice tests online. So you get a lot of ACT practice with this book, but is that practice good? ACT English in the 2021 edition is better than in past editions. The questions are a little on the easy side, but overall are the right length and contain the right mix of topics. ACT Math is similar. It’s a little too easy but will help you learn the topics. Not all of the ACT Reading passages are the correct length, and the difficulty is too high. ACT Science is excellent, as it was in past editions. This is the closest you can get to the real thing in a third-party ACT prep book. Finally, the ACT Writing is good, but not great. The essay prompts are good, but the opinions are too long.

McGraw-Hill has some really nice skills building practice materials for English, Math, Reading, and Science. There’s some basic advice throughout their chapters on skills and strategy too, but certain strategies are not going to work for everyone, such as speed reading, or are too obvious to be of much help (“Listen to your brain”?!). Sometimes the activities are too short, and equal attention is not given to each section and skill. The chapter on ACT Science prep is shorter than the other chapters. And there’s too much focus on easier ACT math skills like elementary algebra. Harder aspects of ACT Math, such as logarithms and trigonometry, are barely explained-and when the Math chapter is about three times as long as any of the other chapters, you’d definitely expect more thorough coverage! The Writing chapter is better than it’s been in previous editions, but is still a little light.

Subject-Specific ACT Prep Books

College Panda’s ACT English: Advanced Guide and Workbook

College Panda’s ACT English: Advanced Guide and Workbook has 30 chapters of easily digestible grammar, punctuation, and organization topics, in addition to 3 practice test sections and a handy “cheat sheet” for quick reference.

College Panda’s ACT Math Workbook

Some prep books focus on general preparation for ACT math at a range of difficulties, while other prep books focus on the most challenging questions. College Panda’s ACT Math Workbook is a great resource that gives clear explanations of all the essential math topics tested on the ACT. There’s even and advanced version of the math workbook. This one follows the same table of contents organization as the regular workbook, but JUST contains question banks for all of the topics.

Erica Meltzer’s The Complete Guide to ACT Reading

For a long time, there really weren’t many great resources for ACT Reading. Thank goodness for Erica Meltzer’s The Complete Guide to ACT Reading. This book contains chapters addressing each reading question type, along with extra chapters on common passage themes and wrong answer types.

ACT Science Prep Resources

ACT Science isn’t really about the science - it’s about reading charts and graphs on scientific content. Any books that try to review a lot of actual science content.

ACT Study Planner

Studying for the ACT can be a lot to juggle, especially when you need to balance it against studying for classes, sports, and other extracurriculars. That’s why I created the ACT Study Planner. It’s a 4-month paperback planner that allows you to organize your study priorities, set goals for the month and week, track your progress, and stay motivated. The planner has space to set initial goals, revisit your areas of focus and priorities as you go, and plan your months and weeks.

Top SAT Prep Books

The Official SAT Study Guide

This SAT prep guide is your one-stop shop for everything you need for SAT prep. It includes nine full-length practice tests along with an all-inclusive guidebook. You’ll get realistic strategies, content reviews, techniques for scoring, and premium access to online tools. Using this prep book is sure to ease your nerves before you take your SAT test!

The title says it all. This means the practice questions you’ll encounter are very close to those you’ll come across in the actual exam. The book contains seven full exams taken from actual past SATs. These practice tests aren’t just examples of what you might find on the SAT; they’re exactly what students have seen on the exam in the past. In my opinion, seeing real questions from actual tests was useful. Finally, the book contains a detailed overview and guide to the exam itself.

SAT Prep Black Book

A lot of high school students have trouble on test day not because of the concepts but because of their nerves and how they approach the SAT test. This book helps you with exactly that. Sometimes we get in our heads about how we take a test and suddenly forget everything we’ve been studying for the last semester, but with a change in mindset, we can conquer these standardized tests! This SAT prep book has hundreds of practice questions, a roadmap to the SAT format, and shows you how the SAT test is designed.

Next up, we like the SAT Prep Black Book Third Edition because it’s chock full of insightful advice, strategies, tips and tricks. Personally, I found this to be very helpful. Finally, the SAT Prep Black Book breaks down a number of online SAT practice exams, with thorough answer explanations for four official practice tests. The SAT Prep Black Book is an outstanding guide for students of just about any level. It can help you both learn useful tricks and change the way you look at the entire test. In other words, you’re not simply memorizing information; rather, you’re learning to build an effective test-taking strategy.

Kaplan SAT Prep Plus

Get everything you need from this SAT prep book by Kaplan Test Prep! It includes five full-length practice tests, over 1,500 practice questions, and a whole year of access to their online portal with other resources. It teaches you how to look at each question and quickly understand what is being asked so you can come up with the correct answer.

One of the most robust prep books on the market, Kaplan’s SAT Total Prep features a broad overview of the exam, how it works, and what kinds of questions you can expect to see across the three sections of the test. In total, there are over 1,100 practice questions in the book. Kaplan is a very respected prep company that excels at being concise but comprehensive. If there’s a downside, it’s that some experts think the book could be a little more challenging. In fact, the sheer coverage of this book puts it ahead of many other study guides.

Barron's Digital SAT Study Guide

This study book is full of practice questions, video tutorials, tips and strategies on performance, and a review of all the SAT test sections! It’s a great option for students who don’t need to do more practice tests and would rather do practice questions about concepts.

If you learn best through lots of practice, Barron’s Digital SAT Study Guide will fit the bill. They provide three complete practice exams, over 1,800 practice questions with detailed explanations, more than 300 online drills targeting every question type on the exam, and score tracking to help you monitor your progress. The Barron’s guide does require a degree of drive and self-application to really get the most out of the book. You’ll need to be willing to dive in and take it seriously, engage at a high level with the content and keep laser-focused on your goal. If you can engage with the text and stay determined, this book can help you break down the material into manageable chunks and give you the practice you need. Bottom line, I was a big fan of Barron’s approach.

Princeton Review Digital SAT Premium Prep

Another great resource is this premium study guide by Barron’s! It has five practice tests, one diagnostic test, and three online tests to give you a total of eight tests to prepare for your SAT.

Rounding out our top 5 is the budget-friendly yet comprehensive guide to tackling the exam, Princeton Review Digital SAT Premium Prep. Each question comes with a thorough explanation to help you grow from your mistakes. An additional online interface provides 250 online flashcards, video lessons, and an admissions guide. The book is a bulky one, with nearly 850 pages of content. However, it’s so well organized that using it is a breeze. This is one of the few study guides out there that can be used all on its own.

Subject-Specific SAT Prep Books

The Critical Reader by Erica Meltzer

This book provides in-depth explanations and numerous examples on how to work through each type of SAT question. It also offers techniques for comprehending complex passages and identifying key information quickly and efficiently.

The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar by Erica Meltzer

This guide provides comprehensive coverage of all the grammar, rhetoric, and data-analysis concepts tested on the redesigned SAT Writing and Language Test. It includes practice questions and in-depth explanations.

The College Panda SAT Math

This book provides comprehensive coverage of all topics tested in the SAT Math section. It is useful for preparing mathematics questions topic-wise and practicing each and every type of question.

Additional Resources

Khan Academy: The Official College Board uses Khan Academy, which is free to use and very comprehensive.
Private Tutoring: If private tutoring options are possible for you, we definitely suggest it.

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