At the moment, practice tests 2, 3, and 4 are all “coming soon.” That’s not just a lie it’s mean. If you don’t have internet access, you get 0 practice tests.Īnd once you create an account on the Kaplan website to get your four practice tests, there’s actually only one.
#Kaplan ielts premier book full#
In fact, there are no full practice tests in the book-you have to go online. The cover of Kaplan’s book says there are 4 practice tests. I said in my post about the Princeton Review’s book that it’s strange to put “1 practice test” on the cover like it’s a good thing-most books have more than than one practice test-but at least Princeton Review was honest. If there is no skill-building practice, the book must have a lot of TOEFL-like practice, right? Well, no, actually. There is no skill-building practice in the middle. There is only description of strategy in text and some sample TOEFL questions. And even if there are not many skill-building exercises separate from sample TOEFL questions, it’s possible to make questions that look like the TOEFL but also help with those skills, like The Complete Guide does.īut Kaplan has none of that. Cambridge is a good example of a book that does this. The best TOEFL books will include practice very similar to the real test, and then something more: they’ll also include exercises for practicing specific skills, like connecting two ideas into one sentence or taking shorter notes. Why are these next to each other? How do I know what’s more important?Įven for a teacher, it might be difficult to see the important parts since there’s so little organization. The second, on the other hand, is about the type of essay you’ll write. The first is a very specific grammar point about one word. (I should mention that neither of these are actually strategies. Strategy #6: Decide if the question asks for an opinion or a preference.
Strategy #5: Know the correct grammar for the verb prefer.For instance, here are two strategies from the writing chapter: The organization of the book is very strange and hard to follow. This makes the book better for new teachers rather than students. In other words, it’s not good for learning to use the strategies, only learning about the strategies.
It will be boring and difficult for many students to read. And it’s not only that: there is a lot of text and description in that advanced English. That might be good reading practice, a challenge, but the book should communicate to everybody, not just be practice. It’s a bit too advanced for some students to read comfortably and understand everything. There is only one serious problem with the test strategy in this book. And because the most of the strategy is realistic and helpful, I can forgive some inaccuracies. That’s misleading, but being careful about the logic of answer choices will never hurt you it’s just not very important. That is, they are wrong because of logic tricks, not language tricks. You won’t need that on your TOEFL.īesides that, some of the wrong answer types (The book calls them “distractors”) are more like GRE, SAT, or GMAT questions. The author recommends knowing scientific facts like the periodic table, but that’s a waste of time. And there’s a lot more good strategy-it’s very rare that this book gives bad strategy. Kaplan recognizes that and tells you the truth: take notes, but focus on listening, not writing. If you do, you won’t be able to listen at the same time. You simply cannot take very detailed notes. Many books don’t recognize that, but Kaplan’s book does.Īnother point that many other books miss is how detailed notes should be. Context can help sometimes, but that’s not the main point.
For example, vocabulary questions in the reading section are mostly just a test of whether you know the word. The author gives realistic descriptions and advice. I agreed strongly with almost every sentence I read. If you follow all of the advice in this book, you will answer the questions on the TOEFL effectively. Let’s start with the good part of the book. To say it simply, this book isn’t for students. But three days later, I was really, really disappointed. And I knew it wasn’t just the book-you get access to online material, too. Yes, I found a few mistakes, but mostly I was excited to have a book that describes realistic, good test strategy. The first 20 minutes I spent with Kaplan’s book were great. For details on this, see Magoosh’s tutorial on using older prep for the 2019 TOEFL.) Fortunately, older-format books are still very useful in prepping for the current TOEFL. As of this writing, there are no TOEFL prep books that reflect the newest version of the test. ( NOTE: The TOEFL books that Magoosh reviews and recommends reflect the older, pre-August 2019 version of the test. By Lucas Fink on Ma, UPDATED ON December 10, 2020, in TOEFL Prep Materials