Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #988293 in Books
• Published on: 2006-08-01
• Released on: 2006-09-19
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 197 pages

Customer Reviews

Covers Material Well, But Full of Typos
I have not studied math in over 15 years. This book helped me prepare for my FTCE Test, and I passed. The book is very thorough in covering the material that you will be tested for. It is unfortunate that this is the ONLY prep book that I could find on this subject (Math 5-9), because it is so expensive and has sooooo many typos.

I am lucky to have a good friend in California who is a scientist and is a natural teacher to help me with the material that I did not remember anymore. Every other page in this book contains a typo, many times the typo is in crucial parts of formulas, equations and other explanations, making the re-learning of some material impossible without the aide of someone well-versed in mathematics, as my friend helped me. Once he identified the erroneous information contained in the typos, he was able to explain these math concepts to me.

Once all the information was clear, I found this book very helpful in preparing me for the test. The practice test in the book is about 5 times harder than the real test. I feel that helped me breeze through the test. I was pleasantly surprised on the test day that they provided us with calculators, too.

Editing Issue
The only issue that I had with this book as well as one other that I have purchased in the XAM series is that there seems to be a lack of editing. In both books, there seemed to be either typos, extra spaces, etc. I also found one question with answers that were incorrect and another situation in which duplicate answers were given for the same question.

Good if you already know the material
I took the FTCE Middle Grades Math 5-9 test and passed my first attempt in March 2008. This was the only book I purchased to review for the test. Just for reference, I will say that I have a degree that was very technical with a large amount of higher level math, so I would consider myself more advanced mathematically than many others.

This book, like all XAM books, has very poor editing, formatting, and many typos. The only thing really useful in the book is the practice exam. It has questions that are mostly representative of the actual exam.

If you do not already know the content, this book is not a good book to learn the concepts. Most of the front of the book (where they 'teach' the concepts) is very limited with poor examples. Many of the practice questions are not even taught in the front of the book. I would not use this book to try to learn how to do the problems. Buy this book if you just need another practice test to work on.