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Rating: 
Summary: Worthless, avoid at all costs
Review: With the exception of a few good pages with grammar and vocabulary, this book is a complete waste of paper and whoever buys it has wasted their money. It would not be so bad if the makers did not specifically say that this was for the exam. If this book simply outlined a sample Spanish test and teach some useful, daily life vocabulary, it would range between fair and good. For a exam guide, however, it lacks most of what the exam covers.For starters, the reading passages are far too interesting, easy, and straight forward. After scoring well on these sections, I had a false impression that the actual AP exam would be this easy. While the translations of the exam questions are easier than the English SAT 1's, some will be boring in both languages, and the questions, as always, are stupid and subjective. The error section was also incredibly predictable. A half hour of studying common errors that the AP uses on purpose can easily give you a good score on this section. Again, the actual exam uses more than five variations of errors; if this was taken from a real exam, it must have become more difficult over the years. The fact that they spend so much time reviewing pronouns, rather than sample exercises, is puzzling. Yes, pronouns, reflexives, and so forth are a part of the exam, but surely parts from actual tests would be a better use of time, and space. In addition, the book (while relatively short) spends half of the space on the Literature exam, while over review books can have several hundred questions fully explaining exercises and solutions. Another annoyance was that the test makers could not put the oral sections on a CD or tape, and simply printed them out with the instruction to have someone read you it. My parents are not Spanish speakers at all, and my Spanish teacher, though a good backup, would not give the pace that the actual test gives. I'm sure that many of the people taking this exam have similar difficulties. Most annoying was that the book showed only high scoring essays, rather than the transition from 0-9. Granted, one essay was a 7-8, but when they print out the high scores with nothing to compare them to, the student will not learn from these mistakes but only see the minimum they must do in order to receive what they consider a decent score. Even so, there were a few redeeming elements. There was some good vocabulary and I was glad to see that for the grammar they did review, they did a relatively thorough job. It's just a pity that they call this an exam review, rather than a crash course in learning 50 Spanish words. In short: Don't buy the book. If you see it in the library, however, copy the vocabulary and grammar pages. Those are worth whatever the library charges.
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