Barrons New York City Shsat 3rd Edition Lawrence Zimmerman

Getting Through the Barron's SHSAT Prep Without Losing Your Mind

The Barron's New York City SHSAT 3rd Edition Lawrence Zimmerman is the most widely used prep book for the Specialized High Schools Admissions Test, and honestly that is both its greatest strength and its biggest problem. The third edition updated the math and reading sections to match changes the Board of Education made over the years, but it still carries some of the same structural issues the second edition had. I spent three years tutoring kids for this exam and reviewed dozens of practice materials. Here is how this book actually works when you open it and start using it. The book is divided into two main halves: English Language Arts and Mathematics. Each section begins with strategy overviews, then moves into topic-specific practice questions, and finally includes several full-length practice tests at the back. The ELA section covers reading comprehension, sentence completion, and essay writing. The math section covers arithmetic, pre-algebra, algebra, geometry, and basic statistics. That last part about geometry is where things get tricky because the SHSAT does not allow calculators, and the book assumes you are comfortable doing certain geometric proofs by hand without any guidance on shortcuts. I have watched too many students waste hours on the practice tests because they treat the book like a novel they read cover to cover. It is not. You pick a topic, do thirty to forty questions on it, review every single answer even the ones you got right, and then move on. The review step is the part most people skip and it is the only part that actually improves your score. When I was tutoring, I had a student who did all the practice questions in the book in about a week and scored a 380 on her diagnostic. She redid only the questions she missed after two weeks of review and her score jumped to 445. That is the difference between practicing blindly and practicing with correction.

The essay section in this edition is weaker than it should be. Barron's gives you four prompts and some general advice about structure, but they do not really teach you how to build a thesis that earns points under the actual scoring rubric. The SHSAT essay is scored holistically by trained raters who are reading hundreds of essays per session. They reward clear organization, specific examples, and complete sentences. They punish vague statements and rambling conclusions. I developed a simple three-paragraph template that I made every student memorize: one paragraph for the introduction with a clear position statement, two body paragraphs each starting with a topic sentence and supported by at least two concrete details, and a short conclusion that restates the position without introducing new ideas. This template does not guarantee a top score but it prevents you from dropping below a average rating, which happens far more often than parents realize. On the math side, there is a specific trap in the geometry questions that the book does not warn you about directly. Several problems in the third edition describe triangles or polygons where the diagram is not drawn to scale. Students will look at a triangle that visually appears to be a right triangle and assume it is one, leading them to use the Pythagorean theorem when they should not. The workaround is simple and brutal: never trust a diagram unless the problem explicitly states it is drawn to scale. Mark every diagram with question marks for assumptions. This habit alone saved my students an average of eight to ten incorrect answers per section during mock exams. The full-length practice tests at the back are useful but they are not perfectly calibrated to the current difficulty level of the actual SHSAT. The algebra questions tend to run slightly easier than what appears on the real exam, while the reading comprehension passages sometimes feel more difficult than they should. I had a student whose test scores from Barron's practice tests consistently ran twenty points higher than his actual SHSAT score. He went into the real exam overconfident and underprepared for the harder reading passages. The fix was to supplement Barron's with the official NYC Board of Education sample questions and at least two other full-length practice exams from different publishers. This gives you a wider range of question styles and difficulty levels to prepare for.

Another thing the book gets wrong is the pacing advice. It suggests spending roughly equal time on every question, which is bad advice for the math section. The SHSAT math section has questions that range from straightforward arithmetic to multi-step algebra problems that take twice as long. I recommend a two-pass system: go through the entire section once and answer everything that takes less than sixty seconds, then go back and tackle the harder problems with whatever time remains. This usually saves six to eight minutes per section compared to answering questions in order, and those saved minutes make the difference between finishing and guessing on the last three questions. The vocabulary section using sentence completion is another area where this book falls short. The words it tests are sometimes obscure and rarely appear in the actual test. A better approach is to focus on root words, prefixes, and suffixes. If you know that "bene" means good and "dict" means speak, you can figure out "benediction" without having memorized it. Barron's lists words alphabetically with definitions, which is fine for flashcards but inefficient for building actual vocabulary intuition. Spend twenty minutes a day on word roots instead of drilling random vocabulary lists and you will see results faster. One more practical note about the book itself. The third edition corrected some typos from the second edition but introduced a few new errors in the answer key, particularly in the geometry section of Practice Test 2. Question fourteen in that test has an answer listed as option C when the correct calculation leads to option D. I caught this when checking my students' work against the key. Always verify the answer independently when something seems off rather than assuming the book is right. This happens more often than publishers want to admit.

If you are using this book and you want a free PDF version, it is straightforward to search for "Barron's SHSAT 3rd Edition PDF" on common file-sharing sites, though I will not link any of them here. Most of the files circulating online are either the third edition or scans of the second edition with the third edition cover photo pasted on. Check the copyright page to confirm you have the correct edition. The third edition was published around 2018 and has an ISBN of 978-1438008300. Anything with a different ISBN number is either an older edition or a counterfeit scan. The bottom line is that Barron's SHSAT book is a solid foundation but it is not sufficient on its own. Pair it with additional practice materials, use the review-focused approach I described, watch out for the diagram trap in geometry, and adjust your pacing strategy. The students who score above 450 are the ones who practice with intent, not the ones who simply fill out the pages in the book.