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Through my experiences as a student and as a tutor, I’ve identified some books that I think are excellent study materials or guides to college and medical school application. I thought I’d share them so that you have a sense of my familiarity with resources to help my students and my mastery of the subjects I tutor. I’ve decided to break down the list by middle-school, high-school, and college, and then by subject. I haven’t listed books for some subjects like SAT I math, because although I have a book I use I’m not quite satisfied with it. The hyperlinks are to the Amazon page in the case of books and the software home pages in the case of software.
1) Middle School
1.1) Classes
1.1.1) English
A) 504 Absolutely Essential Words. Murray Bromberg
A.1) There are many vocabulary books. Some do a better job of choosing words that show up on exams and are useful in life (Murray Bromberg’s books, Norman Lewis’s books). Some do a better job of providing exercises for students to practice using words (World Wise). Some do a better job of clustering words by synonym groups (Magoosh books, Norman Lewis’s books). Some books are designed for quick review before the SAT (Princeton Review’s Word Smart books). For a middle-school student, my favorite word books are Murray Bromberg’s books. She does a better job of picking good words—words that show up on exams and are useful in life—than many other books, say the popular Wordly Wise series or Princeton Review’s Word Smart series. For each word, she has a clear definition and sample sentence. Words are gathered into groups of about 10 for a week’s study, and there are numerous exercises. The sample sentences and exercise sentences are fun and interesting to read.
2) High School
2.1) Classes
2.1.1) Chinese
A.1) These are excellent online flash cards for commonly used Chinese textbooks like Integrated Chinese by Yuehua Liu and Taochung Yao et al.
2.2) SAT
2.2.1) SAT I (The SAT)
A) Verbal reasoning
A.2.1) A good knowledge of sentence grammar and the ability to diagram sentences is key to parsing the hardest passages on the SAT Reading section. I use the Little Brown Handbook to teach students to diagram sentences.
A.2.1) A good knowledge of sentence grammar and the ability to diagram sentences is key to parsing the hardest passages on the SAT Reading section. I use the Little Brown Handbook to teach students to diagram sentences.
A.2.1) Both Barret and Meltzer do a good job of finding evidence that that helps them select the bast answer in reading comprehension questions.
B) Math
B.1.1) Both Jang and Warner have abundant problems broken down by topic. Both have quality answer keys.
C) Writing
C.1.1) Kaplan’s coverage of verbal reasoning and math isn’t strong, but its coverage of the writing section is head and shoulders better than Princeton Review and Barron’s. It distills the grammar rules tested on the Writing Section to about 20 rules. One tricky thing about the writing section is that if one is really nit-picky one can identify stylistic errors in a lot of SAT I questions that are not considered errors by the test makers. Kaplan does a great job of helping one get into the mind of the test makers.
2.2.2) SAT II’s (SAT Subject Tests)
A) Math
A.1.1) The strength of this book is that it’s a very streamlined review of the topics that are actually on the test. The weakness of this book is that it contains numerous errors. It’s the best book for SAT II Math if you’re a pretty good math student and want a quick review before doing practice tests.
A.2.1) In contrast to the Sparknotes book, this book contains very few errors. However, it covers considerably more content than is actually on the test.
2.3) AP’s
2.3.1) Biology
A) Preparing for the Biology AP* Exam (School Edition) (Pearson Education Test Prep). Holtzclaw
A.1) This book is head and shoulders above the competition in terms of presenting all the material that’s on the test and little extraneous material.
2.3.2) Spanish
A) AP Spanish: Preparing for the Language Examination. Jose M. Diaz et al.
A.1) One of the authors of this book, Jose M. Diaz, contributes questions to the AP exam. It’s very good practice for the AP. (Mr. Diaz was my AP Spanish teacher, and I think he did a great job)
2.3.3) US History
A) Barron's AP United States History. William O. Kellog.
A.1) William O. Kellog is a history teacher at St. Paul’s Academy, a famous boarding school in New Hampshire. His book is better than its competition because he not only reviews the facts but also offers good advice for writing essays for the essay portion of the test and discusses some essay topics that are actually likely to show up on the test. By the way, these essay topics are topics like ‘Discuss how congregationalism in New England, the shareholder system in Virgini, and the First Great Awakening contributed to the democratic culture of the United States’—interesting ideas that unfortunately aren’t covered by a lot of textbooks, that are the ideas that actual historians wrestle with and have written well-received books on in recent years, and that will deepen one’s appreciation of American history.
3) College
3.1) Physics
3.1.1) University Physics. Ronald Reese
A) Reese does a much better job of presenting physics theorems in an elegant way that makes clear their simplicity and symmetry than standard textbooks like those by Halliday, Resnick, and Walker; Fisbhane; or Seway and Jewet. He is able to do so because he proves almost everything, which the other authors don’t try to do, and because he organizes his presentation much better. A drawback of the book is that it doesn’t contain as many explanations of applications of the fundamental theorems (e.g., it may not explain how a mass spectrometry machine works based on the Lorentz force law for the force exerted by a magentic field on a moving electric charge). However, one can easily find such explanations in one of the other books I mentioend above, and it’s much easier to learn about these applications that it is to learn and fully understand the fundamental theorems.
3.2) Organic Chemistry
3.2.1) Organic Chemistry as a Second Lanuage, Semester 1. David R. Klein
A) Klein explains organic chemistry much more clearly than any other textbook I’ve seen, and I’ve seen about half a dozen ones pretty closely.
3.2.2) Organic Chemistry as a Second Language, Semester 2. Daivd R. Klein
3.3.2) General Chemistry
3.3.3) Biology
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