Cracking the CBEST, 2nd Edition (Professional Test Preparation) 2nd Edition

I took the CBEST yesterday morning (06/16/07)and have several observations and suggestions which not only do I hope you'll find helpful but with any luck can save you some time and grief. I purchased four review books. The Princeton Review's Cracking the CBEST (2002)," Cliff's Testprep "CBEST, 6th Edition,(2000)" Learning Express' "The Complete Preparation Guide CBEST (2006)," and Barron's "How to Prepare for the CBEST (2001)." Additionally, I purchased one on-line guide and began receiving emails with "tips of the day" from another. Neither on-line guide was helpful in the least and I would caution you to stay away from them no matter how luring their websites are.Now onto the test (and then I'll come back to the guidebooks). The test, as I'm sure you're aware is divided into three sections: Reading, math and a writing portion in which you're asked to write two essays.Let's start with the math. If you go to the official CBEST website they will tell you specifically what you need to know in order to pass this part of the exam. There is no geometry (apparently there was a law suit several years ago and the math portion was made easier) and the algebra on the test is beginner stuff. About the most difficult algebra question went something like this: 10y - 36 + 4y - 6 + y = 3. What's the value of y? Most of the questions are basic math and if I can do them, so can you!With the exception of The Princeton Review's "Cracking the CBEST," all the guidebooks, when it came to math, were significantly more difficult than you need to know. The biggest offender of this was Learning Express' "The Complete Preparation Guide CBEST" which included very high level math and was poorly written and filled with mistakes. The book also comes with a CD of practice tests but the tests on the CD are nothing more than the same questions from the text in a different order. DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK -- YOU'VE BEEN WARNED. In fact we should all stay away from Learning Express' books; after all, as consumers all we can do to send a message to those who try and rip us off is to boycott their products. Enough said...Barron's "How to Prepare for the CBEST" math sections was also more difficult than it needed to be. Additionally they do something that never seems to appear on the actual test. Very often their "choice E" will be "none of the above." I still haven't run into none of the above on any actual CBEST test. I also had an older version of this text and when I compared the two I found almost no difference which I felt odd since between the two publications the test has changed.Cliff's TestPrep's "CBEST (6th Edition) should be the best of the bunch based on the entire line of Cliff's books but while this one is pretty good it's not great. Again, they're not up to date on what's really necessary to learn with regard to the math section, also taking the reader deeper into math than the test taker will ever need to pass the CBEST. But as one of your guides, I do recommend this one but do your own editing with too complex math problems.The best of the bunch (for math) was The Princeton Review's "Cracking the CBEST." In fact on page 7 the authors explain how the CBEST has changed recently. For math, this book is excellent. Enough said.A suggestion to make this experience a bit easier is first go to the CBEST site, read about the specifications but DON'T TAKE THE PRACTICE TEST YET. Use this guide (Princeton's) first and take their practice tests. When you feel you're ready take the official CBEST Practice Test (which you'll find is very close to the actual test), see how you do and what you still need to review. Sadly, CBEST only offers one practice test.READING: First of all, the CBEST passages are reading comprehension and they're short. Think about it, you only have four hours to answer 50 math questions, 50 reading questions and write two essays. There's simply not enough time for long reading passages. The CBEST Reading practice test is a realistic example of the length of the passages.Barron's "How to Prepare for the CBEST" was pretty good (not great) with their reading section prep. Cliff's TestPrep was also good and I thought some of their suggestions and study strategies were very good. Princeton Review's "Cracking the CBEST" reading section was very good and they have a section called "How to Crack It" which was very helpful in their breaking down of the different types of reading questions.Learning Express' "The Complete Preparation Guide CBEST" was sloppy. One of the questions asked about something that wasn't mentioned and there were several mistakes.For the Writing portion I recommend both Cliff's TestPrep and The Princeton Review's "Cracking the CBEST." They both give some good tips and sample essays. Princeton has a template you can follow for your essay which was helpful. The one frustrating aspect of their writing section was they only had the opening paragraph of their sample essay when it would have been helpful to have the entire sample essay to review.One suggestion is to practice writing essays in short periods of time. By the way most of the sample questions I've run into in these guides are pretty close to what's actually asked on the exam. Yesterday's questions were something like, "if you could change one thing about schools what would it be?" and people can find happiness in the little things -- do you agree (something like that).I guess this has been a long winded way of saying there are two guidebooks that are worth buying: The Princeton Review's "Cracking the CBEST," and CliffsTestPrep (although it's out of date for math.)Good Luck.

Despite the fact that this book was written years ago, I gave it a shot since I felt that the reviews were compelling enough. I took the CBEST for the very first time in October 2009. I ordered this book as a last resort because I felt that the practice tests on the CBEST website was not enough for me. This book arrived literally a week and a half before my test. I finished READING (not including the practice exams) this entire book in 2 days and spent the rest of the time that I had until my test taking the practice exams. If you are concentrated, you'll finish reading this book in that amount of time or less (even trying out those math examples). My overall total (all 3 sections) was above 123 (which is what you need in order to be considered "pass") however, I did not pass the CBEST because I scored below a 37 in the writing section. Here's a breakdown of how I feel about the Princeton Review for the CBEST:1.) Reading Preparation: Princeton Review does a great job in the Reading section by giving you examples that agree with the tricks and strategies that they teach you. However, the actual questions on the CBEST reading section contained questions and answers that were much more ambiguous and the answer choices contained far more seemingly "correct answers. Did the reading part of the Princeton Review help me? Not much. I have poor reading comprehension and if you're like me, you might want to find another source to help you out. I still passed the reading section on the CBEST despite my poor reading comprehension, but I really think it was pure luck because I walked out of there feeling like I bombed the reading section...2.) Math Preparation: I felt that the Math portion was really helpful. There were a few questions that may have been on the CBEST where Princeton Review did not specifically prepare me for, but it was not a question where it would completely stump you ( I think). If I were to recommend this book for anyone, it would be solely on the Math part of this book. Princeton Review gave me enough examples and strategies in this book to make me feel confident in the Math section of the test. Math questions on the CBEST are worded fairly the same and I would say that the difficulty level on the CBEST was higher than the questions that the Princeton Review had. Mind you, I am not a math person at all. As a matter of fact, when most people were taking algebra 2 or trigonometry in high school, I was still taking geometry. Although some of you may be able to relate or did worse than me, I failed PRE-Algebra my freshman year... The point here is that if you're bad in math as I am (or worse), this section of the book will definitely help you.3.) Writing Preparation: By now, you probably know what a terrible writer I am and is most likely the reason why I did not pass the writing section. Princeton Review nonetheless helped me in my writing by giving me useful tips such as "structure, organization, word choice, etc...) however, these are all strategies that you can get off of the internet on "How to write a good essay" or even look up a teacher's guideline to a good essay. I think it's really hard to teach someone how to write better when the topics are always changing. It's really important to have someone who has good writing skills to read through your paper after you've written one from the Princeton Review topics because if you're like me with terrible grammar, you are most likely not going to be able to make your paper better because then you would have written it better to begin with and not need someone to look over it. Because when you self-proofread your paper, you should be correcting little careless mistakes and not trying to re-write the whole thing because it sucked the first time around. I may have a really negative view towards writing, but that is because I absolutely despise the fact that I'm terrible at it.The bottom line is...I would only really recommend this book for the Math section. If you want to get this book for the practice tests, I would like to advise you that the questions (in general) are harder than it is presented in this book. Also, there are only 2 practice tests in this book, so if you think its worth the money, go for it.