Do you really disagree with that? That's what a lot of the marketing seems to be focused on. I felt like question exposure alone got me those same insights, and in fact, the official SAT book rather explicitly lists those things out.
Most people don't read the annoying small text that accompanies the books that spells out a lot of those strategies. Instead they'd rather pay someone a lot of money to tell that to them :)
For me, those prep courses would likely be a poor value. However, I likely am not in the demographic who would benefit most from them. There are plenty of people out there who haven't learned how to learn from a book, and so having someone teach them will result in better scores. I would have thought such people will likely struggle in college, yet my grad school had quite a few of them. I guess they found a way to compensate.
The trick I mentioned was not in the official SAT book.
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>Secondly I bought a Kaplan book which just had 12 tests in it for $20.
Did the Kaplan book not have "secrets" of test taking? Mine did, and one of them was actually useful:
When you have an "analogy" question, where they give you an A:B, and then ask which of the five choices have the same analogy.
What do you do if you don't know the meaning of both A and B?
Well, of the five choices, you will find two that are identical as far as analogies go. As an example, if you have two choices:
cat:kitten
dog:puppy
You know neither of these two can be the answer because there would be no reason to pick one over the other.
Then you'll have another choice with absolutely no relationship (e.g. pen:donkey). You can eliminate that immediately. So now you're down to two choices. Pick one randomly.
But yeah - overall I didn't learn any other big secrets - other than the obvious one of working backwards from the answers for many quantitative problems (don't solve an equation for x - just start plugging them in!).