 Hello my people, my name is Meacham. I'm your college counselor and today we're going to compare five digital SAT practice test services. I'm going to put them against each other and figure out which one is the best value for your money and which ones are going to help you prepare better for the SAT. We're going to look at Score Smart, Test Innovators, SuperTutorTV, The Princeton Review, and thesatcrashcourse.com who I gotta admit is a sponsor of this video. We're going to look at the quality of the tests, how much they simulate the digital SAT environment and like how accurate the questions are, quantity of tests, how much material are you getting and of course the value. What are you getting for your money? Which program offers you the best value? For the purposes of this we're just looking at self-guided programs where you get practice tests, you take them when you want and that's it. I want to start with the Princeton Review because they're one of the biggest names in this space and I feel like it's one of those that people will look for first and then there's the digital SAT self-paced course. That's what was paid for here. I think I got to go to practice up here at the top. Let's take a look at test two. You can choose if we want to be timed, time and a half or double time. People who have you know extra considerations for the digital SAT can get extra time if they have like diagnosed learning difficulties but we'll go ahead and just do the regular timed exam here and I'm going to start doing the English portion. The interface feels pretty blue booky. It looks basically the same. I think that's pretty good. We've got our review page feature down here with all the questions and I can go to the review page. That's cool. Okay and I can go back and I can flag for review. I'm just testing out all these things. Okay interesting that's not working. When I click on mark for review it doesn't work. Okay can I mark it for review now? No? How do I mark it for review? Apparently mark for review doesn't work. As you can see I am clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking. Mark for review is broken. I can zoom in and out like I normally would which I like because I do always encourage you to zoom in and out on these questions. The annotation features are here. Again that's a complete waste of time. Don't ever use those. This hard module introduced some kinds of questions that I didn't see in the first module. For example we have a sentence function question here and we're also looking at a paired passage question here which were not previously in the first module. In the first module we had like six note taking questions at the end. Module two only has one note taking question so that's definitely a good example of how they've been diversifying some of the difficulty here. Overall I would say this second module has been harder. Okay so reading and writing was 660. I got a little bit lazy towards the end. Okay so module one I had three incorrect and on module two I had five. Okay so we have question explanations which I do appreciate on this tool like I'm getting information about why my answer was wrong. I can see why why this would be an addition. Like I think that's a good explanation. Note taking questions here. There were a couple of these that felt pretty like subjective to me. This one says it introduced Maya Darren and her film Meshes of the Afternoon. So because it asked me to introduce both I looked for an answer that had information about both. This one just asked me to introduce the film not its director. So each of these three mentioned the director but it wasn't specifically asking me to introduce the director. It's inconsistent. Like if you're gonna ask me to introduce the film and the director and then I get it right when I do that and then you only ask me to introduce the film and I get it wrong when I do that then there's something off. See this is wrong. Like total languages enunciate words and phrases using pitch change. No they distinguish words and phrase using pitch changes. I'm a freaking linguist. I studied language education. This is not right. This is actually wrong. Princeton reviews tests and I've seen this before when they were on paper. They are designed in a way to be unfairly hard which gives you a lower score which encourages you to pay more for preparation. But I will say I like the way that this is presented. This is a good breakdown of your scores. When it comes to quantity Princeton review gives you three full tests. You're gonna spend $300 to get three full tests which makes Princeton review one of the worst values that we're gonna look at today. Considering the SAT itself only costs like $100 to take. Like you could literally just take the damn test instead of going here and doing this and it would cost you about the same. Considering the quality of the Princeton review tests I've given it a 7 out of 10 due to the issues with marking questions for review and some of the issues with the answer explanations and the nitpicky wrong answers that have contradictory explanations. Quantity honestly I'm gonna give it a 4 out of 10. I feel like three full practice tests is okay but you know you could be doing better. This has to be one of the worst values in the entire market. $100 per test makes this one of the most expensive and really that's a rip off. I would never recommend you spend $100 per test just to get three practice tests. Like honestly there's way better alternatives out there. Next up we're gonna look at SuperTutorTV which is also a very popular YouTube channel and one of the few that I actually have a lot of respect for because I think they cover some really important topics and they do it in a very professional way and not the sensationalist way that some other channels like to talk about SAT topics with BS videos like what's gonna be on the March SAT. You don't work for college board. You don't know. They have four tests. They have the one main mock practice test and they said three more by early 2024 and I can confirm that those are there. I'm gonna grab the reading and writing complete section. I see I can choose the different modules if I want to go back and look at like the easy module or the hard module. I think it's nice that they give you that option. Same basic message I see when I open a blue book. We've got our eliminator mode. It works basically the same. Cool. We can mark for review that does seem to work here and then it is shown up here. Okay cool so this looks like a very faithful representation of the blue book app. Zooming works correctly. Look at how it scales the text. Look at how it fills my screen. Look at adjusts. This is great. This is what you want. This one question is a little bit awkward like this is a graph question that's asking you to complete the sentence but they're giving you the whole sentence here as the question instead of just asking you which one completes the text and putting that text down below and for some reason the text is in this odd inverted color box. I'm not quite sure why they're structuring this question this way. I haven't really ever seen one on the digital SAT look like this. The first module is done here and I just want to say this is so far the hardest first module I think I've ever seen in any practice material. I usually can get through a first module in like 15 minutes at Mo's. I can appreciate a test that wants to push you and go harder than maybe the real thing so that you're more well prepared but at the same time I kind of felt like it was unnecessarily difficult in a few cases. Second module was actually easier than the first which concerns me a little bit. It makes me wonder if I got an easy module. Okay so I got 720 so I must have gotten the hard module. They've marked all the ones that I got wrong for review as a way to kind of tell me to go do those. That's nice I guess. They don't really break it down by module here they just have like let me see if I go to reading and writing does it split it up? No so it just gives me all the total questions that I got. It doesn't tell me like where the module ends which is after 27 but still it's like it'd be nice if you could split those up maybe for me. Overall I would say the questions that I missed were hard questions. They were literature questions. Some of them had some small subjective differences but overall I don't really have any major problems with the design of the questions themselves. I feel like these questions were good questions albeit very hard ones. If you're looking to challenge yourself SuperTutorTV's questions are really good. They are strong challenging questions. I would say their quality rating is the best so far. I'm going to give them an 8 out of 10. I only would take a little bit of points off just because I felt like the difficulty was a lot harder than what I'm normally used to seeing for typical digital SAT practice. For quantity I'm going to give them 5 out of 10. Now when talking about the value that you're getting from SuperTutorTV they do include some extra stuff. One, two, maybe three sets of practice for any of these given areas but I don't feel like we're getting a lot of extra material for the money. Average here is about $40 a test if we're getting four practice tests. You're not getting as bad of a deal as something like Princeton Review where you're paying $100 per test but you are still paying a lot of money for these tests and you're not getting a whole lot more for it. So I'm going to put the value down here at 4 out of 10. Next up I want to talk about test innovators. I honestly don't know much about these guys but their website says right here that they have SAT prep for success. Initial impressions like this is pretty close to what I see in Blue Book. Eliminator right next to it could lead to maybe some accidental misclicks because that's why it's nicer to put it on the right. I do got to click the actual letter. I can't just like click the word or the whole area so I got to like pay attention to my clicks here a lot. There is that option to flag it for coming back later. I do like the way they've put this bar up here. I actually think that's a little bit better even zoom in and out but it's not adjusting the way that the text is being presented. So if you notice what's happening here like it's not adjusting where the text is displayed it's not necessarily changing the number of words in a given line. There is some sort of annotation tool here so I can highlight stuff and then click to erase. I'm not seeing like a perfect simulation of Blue Book but it's got most of the things you need. I also like that there's this quick pause in case I want to just come back later. That's kind of a nice feature. This right here is a good example why it gets a little bit annoying when they don't scale stuff like you can see I'm trying to like expand this window so that it should fill more space on the right here and the size of this text is huge so like the question is taking up tons of space on my screen. I got to go all the way down here and now I can't see the notes like I want to be able to see everything all at once. I like that it gives me this clear indication of getting the hard module like that's a really nice touch. I also like that they kind of break things down by easy medium hard difficulty. It says I had seven hard questions and I got one of those wrong and I had 13 medium questions and one of those was wrong. I like this little Gantt chart kind of vibe where they're telling me how much time I spent on them and it's sort of helping me visualize how long it took me to take a look at some of these questions that I got wrong. Oh they even give you the percentages of the questions that people marked. So I got a couple of issues with some of these questions. Not too many. I think for the most part these are pretty good and I would say I would recommend this product. I'm going to say seven also for the quality of the test on test innovators. Questions feel very similar to what I see on the real digital SAT. A lot of data visualizations and they're adding a lot of extra features. Blue book simulation isn't quite as good as the real thing and it's not quite as good as the other ones I've seen so far. When it comes to quantity this is like a 7 out of 10. You've got 10 full tests but even if you only pay for one test you're going to get access to those thousands of questions that they have in their bank and I'm going to give them a 7 on the value too. I think that this is a pretty solid deal. I would honestly encourage a lot of people to check out that $49 option. Like I think to get one full test and access to all those questions for 50 bucks for a year is a pretty good value. That takes me to thesatcrashcourse.com. This video is sponsored by them and I want to be fully transparent with everybody here. I am not going to rate any company better just because I work with that company or they have sponsored any of these videos. The value and the quality and the quantity like all three things are good across the board and I think that they're probably the most solid option for you. Currently they're focusing on their 10 most popular tests. If you saw my video before I mentioned that finding 20 since I've done a lot of review on their questions they're doing some reworking with those other 10 tests and right now they have a main package of 10. S.A.T. Crash Course has made their first 10 tests even better by making video explanations for the answers. So at any point in your review of those 10 tests you can just click solution video. Why each response is right? Why each one is wrong? You can turn on the transcript subtitles here as well and overall this is a really good way to get an explanation for your answers. I feel like it's much better than just a pile of text at the bottom of the screen that can be a little hard to process. As far as the app design they simulate the blue book environment perfectly. I did not see one missing feature. I've never encountered one bug or glitch quantity. Again we're talking about 10 practice tests here for 200 bucks if you buy them all together and that brings me into the value proposition here. The only other company that can compete on value here is Test Innovators because they're selling 10 tests for $1.99 so it's exactly the same price basically $1 difference. But here's where it gets interesting. If you use the code SCORE you're going to get an extra 20% off your purchase when you're at thesatcrashcourse.com and that definitely makes it the best value that's out there. If you can save 20% off of this it's automatically the best value. You're not going to find a better deal. Okay we are on our last service it's called Score Smart. Now naturally you would think that I'm going to be a big fan of this one because it's got SCORE in the name that's the name of my business also. Is Score Smart as awesome as Score Test Prep and College Counseling and would I recommend it for you? We're going to find out. They offer one free test that you can take right now which is very cool. I think it's really good for everybody to get a free test so they can see if they like the platform or not. The interface here when you log in. Now I did buy this second digital SAT test. I had opened the first one for like a minute and then I decided I wasn't going to do it and then it basically marked it as done for review. So be advised if you open anything here you better be ready to take it and you better be ready to say goodbye to your $35. Don't clear the browser so yeah don't leave okay. Okay so we have some instructions it looks like there's a few different tips. Eliminator mode works fine. Mark for review seems to be working. Question number two does it show up down there? It does okay. That's features. How's the scaling? Scaling is good. We can zoom in and out. That's what I like to see. I have gotten to the end of the first module here. I feel like the first module was pretty good for a first module. It didn't feel too hard or too easy. However there is no review page. It's kind of like when you get to the end here it's straight up says you better like go back and check until you know until you're super ready to end. Module two is done. Some of the stuff in the dashboard is a little bit awkward to look at. Like I feel like the information here isn't as clear as it could be. It tells me that okay I got only one wrong in the first module and two on the second module. Click on a circle to see more analysis so let's take a look at that report. I feel like this should be easier. Like it'd be nice if it just jumped me straight to the questions and I could look at them the way I do with most things. Okay this is a zip file. One minute 37 seconds later. Back close this out. Review questions. Okay maybe that's where I gotta go. Okay so we missed number 11 on the first module. That's the only one. Let's go to question view. That's gotta be okay finally here we go. Okay so not easy to get to the questions and just go straight to reviewing them. If I'm just looking to find the ones that I made a mistake on like if I go to performance by question right I see that 11 was wrong. I have to remember that 11 was wrong. Like if I go here on question view there's no indication that I missed any of these questions. It just shows the answer that I marked and I can check the answer and it'll tell me if it's okay or not. Okay so it's a green check if it's correct. It's gonna be a little awkward like here I gotta go and click the answer. Okay I was between that one and that one. That seems fair. I don't see any explanations here. I don't see any like reasoning for why those answers are right or wrong so that's kind of a hit against this too. The other thing is I marked some of these questions for review specifically because I kind of wanted to go back and take a second look at them because there were some questions that I wasn't too sure about but that hasn't been saved so like I can't go back and check on some of those ones where maybe I guessed so that kind of brings down the quality ranking for me. I'd put it at like a 6 out of 10. I feel like there's some missing features that need to be added and the interface could be a little cleaner and a little easier to use and that would make this a much better product. So the value proposition for ScoreSmart isn't bad. I mean I'd probably call it a 4 out of 10 because you're talking about $35 per test which is still quite a bit. It's definitely not as bad as Princeton Review which is god awful. And it's certainly better than SuperTutorTV and there's more exams available but there is no extra material and in order to get a better deal on those tests you have to go all the way up to like the big package that gets them for $25 a piece. So I feel like ScoreSmart not a bad deal but definitely not the best option here. Let's just do a quick recap here to close this out. We've got our five services. I'm going to start at the bottom with the Princeton Review. We've got quality issues with the app. Only three tests and an exorbitant price. That one is dead last and it's not even close. After that I'm going to put ScoreSmart in fourth place. I think that while they have a large number of tests in fact more than anybody else that we've looked at today. There's some quality issues, user interface issues and the pricing isn't great compared to some of the other options out there. I'll put SuperTutorTV in third place. I think they have very high quality tests although the difficulty is a little bit broken and while they are more expensive than something like ScoreSmart I think that you're getting more value for your money considering the fact that they do have extra material and overall the interface is an excellent simulation of Bluebook. In second place I have Test Innovators. Their value is tough to beat. You can get 10 tests for $20 a piece if you buy the full package or you can just get one and still get access to tons of extra material. The fact that Test Innovators has all that extra material makes them a really good value as well and I think that the quality of their offering is really good even if it's not a perfect Bluebook SIM. It's decent, it's good enough, gets the job done. In first place I got to put the SAT Crash Course.com. They have just as many exams as Test Innovators but they've also got great video solutions to their questions now. They've got an incredible value if you use the code Score when you check out. You're going to get a better deal there than you will anywhere else. Their Bluebook simulation is simply perfect. There's not a single flaw with it. I can honestly say that SAT Crash Course.com has built a fantastic product. If you're interested in learning more about them you can go to thesatcrashcourse.com. You can use the promo code Score at checkout to get 20% off. Hopefully you found this helpful. If you have any experiences with some of these companies and you want to share them please do in the comments below. I would love to hear what you think about these services and especially if you've used more than one it would be great to get your input. Thank you so much for watching this and I'll see you next time.