A blasphemous question: Is Xiggi wrong?

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
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<p>Xiggi- Have you taken the new SAT? I have enjoyed reading through your posts and have found some of your suggestions helpful but your key strategies seem to come from 2005 as the new SAT was introduced. Please correct me if I am wrong on this because I admire the work you have done over these past years and know you have helped countless numbers of students but the new SAT continues to evolve. </p>

<p>I agree with Bilguun - from what I have been told (by educators that have more than a superficial knowledge of the test) and have seen from the recent published tests, 35-40% of the critical reading these days is vocabulary based. This is made up of the 19 SCs and usually 7-8 “Vocabulary in Context” questions in the reading passsages. Of course a student must spend time learning strategies for the other 60% of the section but vocabulary plays more than a small part in the critical reading score.</p>

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<p>You can only really consider vocabulary testing to be just over one-quarter of the CR section. Vocabulary-in-context essentially takes ordinary words and usually supplies alternate definitions to the words based on the content of the passage. That is reading comprehension. Essentially, you could say that the entire CR section is vocabulary since the meaning of words is the fundamental base for reading comprehension. But much of the SC part is not knowledge of vocabulary words but rather knowledge of the context of the sentence which requires reasoning instead of pure rote memorization.</p>