<p>I have to dilemma about how many words I should memorize using Barrons. Some say (xiggi's tips) that barrons's likes to throw in gre and other vocab words in there, which not likely to show up on the test. So far I memorized the high frequency and Hot Prospects words list. What do you guys thing? Should seriously look into memorized all other words in the list or is it just a waste of time? Your thoughts and suggestions?</p>
<p>Of the 2521 words included in the new SATs I have analyzed so far (all the Blue Book tests, all the online CB tests, and 7 previously administered SATs from 2006 and 2007), 1695 were <em>not</em> in the Barrons list.</p>
<p>This number is a little misleading because I only compared exact forms of words using a computer program--for instance, if "abandoned" had been on the SAT and "abandon" was on the Barrons list, the program would have counted that as a miss. But I went over the results quickly myself, and it seems to me that even if you went through and manually compared these words, taking variations in form into account, Barrons would still cover about half of the CB tests. . . even if you learned <em>all the words</em>. And yes, lots of the words in Barrons are too hard or too rare for the SAT. It's not just that they draw on GRE vocab; some GRE lists are a great source of SAT words. It's that some of their vocabulary is just too unusual for CB exam prep. . . or so it seems to me, so far.</p>
<p>Don't learn Barrons. Learn the high frequency lists. Then practice problems.</p>
<p>oh alright, thx for the head ups</p>
<p>Any recommendations for good books or sites for SAT vocabulary? I am currently using <a href="http://www.testprepreview.com/vocabulary.htm%5B/url%5D">http://www.testprepreview.com/vocabulary.htm</a>, which is a lot of words and it also includes GRE vocab, which I'm not thrilled about...</p>
<p>i did some research and found these two. Note- make sure you have adobe acrobat reader installed. </p>
<p><a href="http://www.freevocabulary.com/vocabulary.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.freevocabulary.com/vocabulary.pdf</a>
<a href="http://img.sparknotes.com/content/testprep/pdf/sat.vocab.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://img.sparknotes.com/content/testprep/pdf/sat.vocab.pdf</a></p>
<p>Thanks for the links desidude006!!!
What is the best strategy to increase the critical reading score?</p>