I was supposed to take the SAT Saturday but it was rescheduled because of the snow. I thought I was prepared but at the same time was a little worried. On my most recent practice test I got a 740 CR and really want to bump up to over 750. On this test in CR of the questions I got wrong 3 of them were vocabulary. Now that I have an extra couple weeks, does anyone know where I can find a list of about 1,000 words to review for the SAT. I saw some youtube video from testmasters that there was a 2,000 vocab word list and that’s where I got this idea. It would be great to find one big list because up to now I have been studying small lists from a bunch of different websites and it’s very tedious. Thankyou!
Cramming in 1,000+ words is not a good use of your time. Review your old tests and make your own list while also learning the patterns of the testmakers. If that’s not enough, get Direct Hits (500 words).
@CHD2013 I don’t think I will see any improvement in reading comprehension in one-two weeks time. In these next two weeks I do believe however I can study vocab and work on the essay a little. I’ve taken about 12 practice tests and have already learned a lot of the patterns of the testmakers. That being said, I still get 2-3 vocab wrong on every test while I can get nearly every reading comprehension question right. Why is cramming a bad idea? It’s 2 weeks also, not a night-before-the-test cram…
I just think 2 weeks is not enough time to learn that many words. Most people would have better recall of a smaller list. If you think you’re unusually strong at memorizing words in a way that you can use them on sentence completion questions, then go for it.
@CHD2013 Ok… Understood thanks for your input
2 weeks is plenty of time to learn 1000 words. I see it all the time. I’d probably get on Quizlet and find Word Smart or Direct Hits (I’m sure someone has made sets for those volumes).
OP, please keep us posted. If you do try to learn 1,000 words I’d be curious to know if you were successful and if you thought it was helpful for your test.
Marvin, do these kids that you’re referring to spend all their time memorizing the words or do they do it in conjunction with a (probably pretty demanding) school schedule? Do you find that it typically helps them on their tests?
Yea, get Direct Hits by ma boi Larry Kreiger
@CHD2013 - some during vacation, some after school and on weekends. I find that hard-working students can pretty comfortably memorize 100 words a day and that yes, it very reliably helps them on the test. I routinely see over 100 students a year go from missing 10-12 sentcoms to missing 0-1 sentcoms per test (a gain of over 100 points in just sentcoms) and I’m also convinced that one reason (not the only!) many (not all!) students struggle to understand passages is because passages contain vocab words. I’d also argue that since many (or even most) answers are paraphrases of ideas in the passages vocab is tremendously helpful; after all, paraphrase means to put the idea in different words, so in order to identify accurate paraphrases, one must know different words 
I also know that studying mass vocab is a huge pain, woefully unpleasant, and decidedly not “educational,” and that other people have other advice. I’m fine with that, but in my humble experience, studying well-curated vocab lists is helpful for almost everyone and is relatively easy since it doesn’t require particularly well developed reading skills or intelligence. In that way, I’ve found that vocab acquisition is a pretty reliable equalizer.
@marvin100 - Is english typically the first language of your students? If not, have you noticed a difference in the effectiveness of vocab studying for native english speakers vs. non . . .?
I’d say English is the first language for 20-30% of my students, and I haven’t noticed a difference other than the fact that some non-native speakers (esp. those who still have fluency issues) have more vocab to learn.