<p>“Not a test that the rich can exploit by taking expensive courses to boost their scores.” SAT prep books can be had for free from the library. The correlation of SAT with family income is mostly about wealthier families tending to stress education more and tending to have access to better schools. Someone posted another thread saying, don’t blame the SAT if the wealthy are better educated.</p>
<p>My daughter and I both made National Merit. Total cost of test prep, about $25–for the TWO of us. And we could have done it for free if we were from families where that expenditure was a hardship. I’m just sick and tired of hearing about how super-expensive test prep classes are a necessity. Frankly, I could have afforded to pay for test prep classes for my daughter, and we both thought it would be a waste of her time. </p>
<p>It will be very interesting to see how this free SAT test prep from Khan plays out. I predict we will see very little change in the correlation between family income and SAT scores. Because the problem isn’t with pricey test prep. What matters is the value placed on education by the parents, the educational level of the parents (so that kids’ academic interests are supported and kids learn good grammar hearing their parents talk), the quality of the schools they attend, and the motivation and reading habits of the kid. Many of these factors also correlate with family income.<br>
You can give kids access to test prep videos, but those kids already have access to free test prep books in the library and materials on the web, and they aren’t using them. Until you can convince them that education is important from an early age (because it takes years to become a really strong student, great reading and math skills aren’t something you can cram in a few months of test prep classes) then you won’t see those gaps closing.</p>
<p>@BassGuitar, if you have been an avid reader, what you find when you look at SAT word lists, is that you know about 80-90% of those words already. You are way ahead of the kid who doesn’t read. My daughter studied an SAT word list, and she said that 5 words from that list appeared on the SAT. But she also felt that she knew enough about the questions (including all the words but one in the uncertain questions) that she probably would have answered them correctly even if she hadn’t known those 5 words. If she had not done that test prep, even if we assume she would have missed all 5 questions, her score would have dropped by only 60 points. So I would say that the SAT did perform its intended function of identifying her as an avid reader with a large vocabulary. If it’s so easy for kids who don’t read to just study some vocab and ace the reading section, then why don’t we see this happening all the time? Why only a few thousand 800’s in over a million test-takers?</p>
<p>It seems like with the new test, getting into prestigious colleges (namely Ivy) will be much harder for top students. Easier tests mean more accessibility, sure, but that also mean that students will have to differentiate themselves from others, in other ways than just SAT.</p>
<p>Besides, top-colleges, given these circumstances, will ask for the “optional” essays.</p>
<p>This whole discussion of “SAT words” is surreal.</p>
<p>Very few of the words that show up on the test are what any educated adult would call obscure. Sure, there are a few here and there, but unscrupulous? Seriously? Not home at the moment but I will come back with a link that will show where most of the words come from.</p>
<p>Also, the vast majority of kids, maybe even especially rich kids, would not study a list of frequently repeated SAT words if their lives depended on it. There may be a lot of talk on CC about Direct Hits and Essential, but LK is no millionaire best seller. If I had to guess, I’d say 80%+ of these books (purchased by hopeful parents) sit unopened on the shelf.</p>
<p>When I promised the link I actually expected a better list than this (it changes all the time and in the past you could pull off twice as many frequently repeated “SAT words”). But you have to admit that this is still a pretty good list. So, where do these words come from?</p>
<p>Welcome to Merriam-Webster’s most frequently looked up words…</p>
<p>Now, if these words are so gosh darn obscure and useless for our children to have in their vocabulary inventories, then why do so many people keep looking them up???</p>
<p>There is nothing wrong with the way vocabulary is tested on the current SAT. This entire exercise is a public relations charade.</p>
<p>I don’t think it improves scholastic ability if the student just memorizes the words with flash cards or Daily SAT Word text. And I think that’s what SAT preppers do. Easy come, easy go.</p>
<p>“I don’t think it improves scholastic ability if the student just memorizes the words with flash cards or Daily SAT Word text. And I think that’s what SAT preppers do. Easy come, easy go”
Actually, I encountered many of the words on the SAT list I used when I was in college. And I still remember many of them. I thought it was a very valuable activity for my child, even though she is an avid reader, there were definitely gaps. As she went through the lists, and occasionally commented on some word, I was quite surprised that she didn’t know particular words which I think every well-educated adult should know, and which I think will be helpful to her in college. Ideally, one would learn all the vocab simply by reading, but some of those words she even saw in reading and never learned and never bothered to look up. We even came across a word or two like that in Harry Potter, which she must have read 5 times prior to the SAT, and yet when she read it after studying for the SAT she recognized a word from her list and finally knew what it meant.</p>
<p>If some end up following the incredibly POOR advice of memorizing words and slaving over flashcards, that is hardly what effective “preppers” do, let alone should do. It has always been a profound misgiving to think that the SAT was a test of arcane vocabulary. Inasmuch as the test rewards the student who has developed a sound vocabulary through active reading, it does not reward the knowlegde of the words directly but the fact that an active reader is able to understand the word in its correct context, and … recognize how to answer the questions correctly even when not actually knowing every arcane word on the test. </p>
<p>One of the reasons why students finds it so hard to increase their reading scores is that … learning silly lists of words is mostly ineffective. Many waste their time in this futile exercise and then simply give up on actually learning what works. Fwiw, what works will still remain a high hanging fruit in the next iterations of the SAT, as the removal of those hard and silly words will NOT result in an easier test. </p>
<p>I think it will be a sad day for this country when the word “unscrupulous” is officially deemed irrelevant for aspiring college students to know. </p>
<p>@xiggi, this is probably the 10th time I’ve seen you weigh in on the uselessness of learning vocabulary, despite clear opinions of others that it did help them. Interestingly, in all of your lengthy posts on the subject, you allude to “what works” while never managing to explain it in the least. </p>
<p>I asked my daughter if she could have spent her SAT prep time in any more useful way, and she said, no. If anything, I wish she had learned more words, since just the other day, I was surprised by yet another word I would have expected her to know, but she did not. Of course reading is the most important thing, but studying vocab can shore up a lot of uncertainties and close a lot of gaps.</p>
<p>You have to know your kids. If they are near-acing the Math and Writing sections but getting 5+ sentence completion questions wrong, it’s pretty obvious that the constraining factor is not the internal logic of the given sentences. In these cases, studying vocab is extremely efficient in raising scores.</p>
<p>Xiggi’s advice may be spot on for the typical student but is probably overstepping a little bit for the subset of CCers closing in on perfect scores. Not knowing the definitions of the words is the constraining factor for most of these kids. It is a rare case that a high scoring student know all the words in a question and still get it wrong. In cases where a student does not at first recognize that a tertiary meaning of a common word is called for, they almost always work back around to the correct choice via POE because they don’t fall for the decoys.</p>
<p>Also, I agree with the general sentiment that learning vocab is useful beyond the SAT, and that calling these words “obscure” is in most cases a gross exaggeration. I would not recommend extensive vocab study for most kids, but for the type of kid who is not logic constrained on the SAT, many of the dowsides do not strongly apply. Retention? Sure, if all you read are comic books, you will likely soon forget the meanings of lugubrious and mendacious. But I don’t think some satisfactory level of retention is a problem at all for the type of kids I would advise to study vocab.</p>
<p>Thank you for that. My sense is that the changes to the SAT coincide quite nicely with a falling demographic. The numbers of college-bound teens peaked in the U.S. somewhere around 2007, have continued to dwindle, and will continue to dwindle until (I think I read) 2020 when a population rise begins anew. How do the colleges continue to boost the selectivity rates they’ve enjoyed–and wish to preserve–over the past 8 years? It reminds me of corporations trying to sustain unprecedented growth and continuing to show record profits. It takes some creativity. Accept some international kids, create some smoke-and-mirrors with applications to greater numbers of schools from the same pool of kids…and create a test that allows more and more kids to score competitively. Couple that with grade-inflated high schools and the effect of the SAT is blunted. The brilliant kid doesn’t necessarily stand out. Students have to find ways to differentiate themselves from others, ways that are both non-academic and academic. I don’t think this is at all limited to Ivy-type schools though and I think we’ve been seeing this trend already. There’s good and bad to it: On the good side there are a broader array of schools with highly able peers so many more choices for students. On the very bad side, the stress level/unpredictability/inconsistency associated with the search process is even more greatly exaggerated. It certainly makes the notions of reach/match/safety sort of quaint and obselete. </p>
<p>Does anyone else remember analogies on the CR SAT? They were my eldest’s favorite part of the test. When these were removed in the last reinvention of the SAT, the test became more “coachable” and much less a test of verbal reasoning. Now “SAT words” (none of which strikes me as particularly obscure or useless) are being eliminated and the test becomes even less a measure of reasoning ability. </p>
<p>Oh, I think it’s about declining market share to the ACT, not propping up college selectivity. By tying the new SAT to common core, Coleman has positioned it to be more popular. He’s ignoring the fact that not all states have adopted common core, but perhaps this is also a way of applying subtle pressure. I would guess they will quickly toe the line when parents start complaining that their kids aren’t being prepared for the SAT like kids in every other state are.</p>
<p>"@xiggi, this is probably the 10th time I’ve seen you weigh in on the uselessness of learning vocabulary, despite clear opinions of others that it did help them. Interestingly, in all of your lengthy posts on the subject, you allude to “what works” while never managing to explain it in the least."</p>
<p>Dude, if you don’t think xiggi has explained what works you are not paying attention</p>
<p>Mathyone, I understand that it would be easy to miss what I wrote as it dates back to the inception of the site more than a decade ago. Like others who started preparing for the SAT, I stumbled on the (then) famous lists of words. If you were to look at some of the posts that have been stickied, you might read about my efforts to analyze the effectiveness of various lists of words and compare such lists with different approaches. One such list was offered by Barron’s as their editors decided to recycle an old GRE list. Over the span of a dozen of administration, I tracked the incidence of any of the 3500 words and shared the results several times. In addition, I posted several lists including a list I culled from the past 10-20 recently released tests. </p>
<p>My conclusions, which have not changed since then, is one would find a much better return on time by working through the real tests, even it was limited to READING the tests and check the answers to identify any “holes” in the vocabulary. To this date, I remain convinced that this method is faster and allows for a much better retention than slaving over 100s of words in a session of cramming. In a way, the “study in context” is more or less what led Krieger to develop his “direct hits” method. The origin of the words is none other than previously released tests. </p>
<p>Again, you may have missed my very old posts, but now you have a small insight of what I have been advocating for years, namely to use the past tests to slowly build blocks of knowledge. It works for math and writing, and it also works VERY WELL for the harder to prepare for … reading. In the end, it is a matter of effectiveness, as one can decide between reading sterile lists of words or reading texts that contain many of the words that might reappear in addition to gaining many insights in how the test is structured and how the ETS writers develop their questions. And this part is of foremost importance! </p>
<p>In the end, I think that some seem to misunderstand my positions on learning vocabulary. I believe in the value of possessing a large vocabulary and know that there are many ways to acquire it. I simply do NOT believe that the most productive manner to develop a vocabulary is through the attempt at memorizing lists of words that have a rather poor chance to appear on the next test. In so many words, the time necessary to “study” 3,500 words should be better spent reading and analyzing a nice stack of past tests. </p>
<p>@xiggi, I don’t understand the point of this. Most people are already reading the old tests because they take them as practice. I assume they would learn any words they didn’t know as part of their prep. I think simply reading through all the old tests ruins the value of being able to practice timing by actually taking them. </p>
<p>I did look at some of your old posts. I found the list you had made of “SAT words” from 10 old SAT tests, and I recognized on that list many words I had encountered while studying a vocab list for my own SAT. I agree a session of cramming vocab is useless. That is why I would only suggest it for the student who had quite a few months to prepare.</p>
<p>If you check current postings from students who just took the SAT in recent months, you can find several who attribute most of their missed questions to not knowing vocab. I agree this doesn’t apply to every student, but it does help some.</p>