<p>@xiggi @mccombshopeful @GettingDepressed </p>
<p>I scored a 780 on CR and all I did was study 3,000 - 4,000 vocab words. Did some practice tests but my score never went up until I was killin’ that vocab. Studied those words in about two months so it’s definitely possible to increase your score. If you can read the passage and questions you can get the right answer. The rest is just about intelligence.</p>
<p>Some people just weren’t born smart enough to get that good score.</p>
<p>@SaveOurSkin lol I doubt that ! SAT CR is designed so that everybody, EVERYBODY, can nail the reasoning process, as long as they know how to do so. Thus it has nothing to do with intelligence.</p>
<p>@SaveOurSkin - congrats on you high intelligence level. Do you do autographs?</p>
<p>@phongtheha</p>
<p>As long as you know how to do so? Maybe some people can’t be taught how to do so, like some people can’t be taught astrophysics. If what you’re saying is true anyways, then everybody should just be studying vocab because apparently everything that’s not extreme vocab is understandable.</p>
<p>There’s no need to study 3-4000 vocab, if you read a lot of high level books (War of the worlds, Slaughterhouse 5, scarlet letter, etc), magazines etc, you’ll learn most of them naturally.</p>
<p>Also doing it that way is much easier than brute memorization, since you can see the context in which those words are used.</p>
<p>I thought that the SAT black book was really good. It showed you how every answer choice is literally restated in the passage. I really was skeptical, but my friend let me use her book since she already graduated, and I can see improvement. Granted, its only in practice tests so far, but I do see a marked improvement</p>
<p>@jarjarbinks23 - because somehow spending countless hours (much more than you would just straight learning words) straining your eyes over small text and cherry picking words (which may or may not be relevant to the SAT) to look up in the dictionary is better than looking at a condensed list of SAT words that will be much faster to study. You can always look up the words in context if you need it anyways. If you just want a high score like me, using @jarjarbinks23 is a terrible, inefficient, ineffective strategy. Probably why JarJar didn’t score so well on the CR :)) </p>
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<p>Here is the real issue. Were you to “spot” all the vocabulary words in the CR sections to a candidate, the results would not change a lot, as the vocabulary has a small impact on the overwhelming majority of the questions. There is rarely more than one question that asks anyone to redefine a word. The rest is based on … well, comprehension of the passages and the ability to recognize the relation between the questions and the text. </p>
<p>Further, the main issue is to rely on lists of words to study the vocabulary. Almost all lists are culled from past tests but rarely provide the correct context, let alone the secondary meanings that are tested on the SAT. Rather than slaving over lists of questionable value, one does accomplish much more by reviewing past tests to understand the format and how ETS/TCB tests a student’s knowledge. Just as it is for the math and the writing, ETS relies on similar patterns and devices. </p>
<p>The memorization of words is the worst approach to prepare the SAT, with the sole exception of people who TRULY do not understand English at a middle school level. But such student is facing multiple hurdles in addition to the SAT, which make the SAT results an afterthought. </p>
<p>@SaveOurSkin I actually got an 1540/1600 (800 CR, 740M)…and I did that using half your effort :)</p>
<p>It’s not cherrypicking words, it’s running across words you don’t know while reading, looking them up and understanding their definition in context, and moving on. </p>
<p>In essence, it’s a natural process that you don’t even think about much while reading.</p>
<p>Edit: You memorized that much and couldn’t get an 800? Looks like someone isn’t so intelligent after all.</p>
<p>@Phongtheha IMO it partly has to do with intelligence, some just won’t understand how to pinpoint a main idea or a theme, no matter how much practice he/she has.</p>
<p>But yea I agree most of it has to do with the wrong methodology (and lack of practice and consistent reading)</p>
<p>@xiggi:
“Were you to ‘spot’ all the vocabulary words in the CR sections to a candidate, the results would not change a lot, as the vocabulary has a small impact on the overwhelming majority of the questions.”</p>
<p>I’ve done exactly that, and your prediction did not match my results. Even extremely low fluency international students can do great on this test if they know all the words. In fact, I’ve found that only the most extremely incompetent readers can fail to get at least 650 if they know all the vocab and students who read even fairly well will be above 700 as soon as they’ve learned the words. Students who have decent reading skills, learn some SAT-specific methods and tips, AND master all the vocab are invariably 750+. (12 years teaching this stuff in Asia)</p>
<p>a problem is that many words, though they may be in the critical reading, are not in most word lists. Suppose a test is about weather and mentions jet stream, it is entirely possible that a person, knowing jet and stream, would not know what a jet stream is. I, at least, have yet to see such phrases and terminology in word lists (and I’ve gone through quite a lot of them, Princeton, Barron, Internet etc). Or perhaps an excerpt taken from a detective novel in which the detectives encounter a red herring.</p>
<p>That’s why reading is important for certain terminology, but memorization is certainly useful for many words as well (perusal, pundit etc.). I’d say a combination of both would be best, but reading is certainly time consuming and one may not actually encounter useful terminology </p>
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<p>Sure, in addition of having a different pool of students, you are making an assumption that requires a gigantic leap of faith, namely … that mastering ALL the vocabulary is feasible. We know that it is impossible to master ALL the vocabulary since the English dictionary is waayyy larger than the scope of the SAT and that the learning of vocabulary from asinine lists rarely contain the secondary or tertiary meanings of words. On the other hand, you also list “decent reading skills and learn some SAT-specific methods and tips,” as the elements of your success towards a 750+! </p>
<p>So which one do you think account for more of the success? Adding a few (and easy to master) SAT techniques to a group of students who are typically trained to be competent in both rote memorizarion AND logic, and perhaps have been taught to achieve a decent level of reading comprehension? </p>
<p>No matter how we slice it, the CR section of the SAT is NOT a vocabulary tests. Year after year and test after test, we have seen those so-called hit lists and the result is highly predictable. No more than a handful of words should escape the AVERAGE students and most of the words were NOT necessary to find the correct answer. THAT is the “hit” result of the reviews of the test. It applies to all lists and the famous Direct Hits.</p>
<p>On the other hand, millions of DOMESTIC students face the same problems regarding the CR. They know all or almost all words that are tested in the passage sections and still fail miserably.</p>
<p>The bottom line? Even we would agree that developing a stronger SAT vocabulary is beneficial, the question is how does one accomplish that? My point, also based on a dozen years of experience, is that it is NOT through the study of moronic lists but to the proactive review of dozens of offificial tests. The bonus … all those darn words that have been “listed” appear magically and with the proper context of the test! But the real gains come from understanding how the questions are developed and FINALLY understand that all the answers are in the passages! </p>
<p>Be well! </p>
<p>@xiggi “the real gains come from understanding how the questions are developed and FINALLY understand that all the answers are in the passages!”</p>
<p>I agree that this is extremely important, but in my experience, that doesn’t mean much if students don’t know the words. Students will see a sentence in a passage like “Professor Trilby was unable to replicate the experiment because funding had dried up” and if they don’t know “replicate” <em>or</em> they don’t know “reconcile” they’ll be very attracted to an answer like “Scientists need funding to reconcile their experimental data.” This is a common wrong answer type and one that can only be avoided with simple vocab knowledge. Logic will accomplish zero if you don’t know those two words <em>for real</em> (a “hunch” just won’t cut it). I see it day in and day out, and the majority of my students are fluent English speakers who have been educated in international schools or boarding schools.</p>
<p>@xiggi - The popular consensus is that vocabulary is the key to understanding the text. I don’t know why you think these vocab lists are so “random”. I’m fairly certain that if you learn 2000 of these designated words based on previous tests, you will understand 99% of the words you encounter on the test. </p>
<p>One might understand 99 percent of the words on the test without ever having read your list of 2000 words. And there is a real chance that none of the 2000 words were relevant to an ANSWER on the test. </p>
<p>The first, that one might know words without studying them, is absolutely true. Some kids are very well read. They finish CR quickly and need little external guidance aside from maybe an hour of SAT-specific tips. Some of them may need some external discipline, of course.</p>
<p>The second sentence is extremely unlikely. Extremely. In fact, I’ve never seen that–or anything even close to it–happen.</p>
<p>@xiggi - If someone can look at a list of 2,000 advanced SAT words and know all of them, he or she is an advanced reader not in need of much CR practice in the first place.</p>
<p>If like the other 99% of kids in America who don’t read, studying those 2000 unknown, high frequency words will be highly beneficial. Perhaps you knew all the words in the first place because your parents forced you to read, but the majority will study those words and recognize them consistently whenever they are taking an SAT. This was the case with me over 10 practice tests and 2 real tests and has been the case with most my friends.</p>
<p>I am glad @marvin100 finally used an example to explain how a strong vocabulary heavily effects the test. You can know 95% of the words your reading, but because the answers on the test are never 100% spot on and often require students to understand the nuances of the question and responses, a large vocabulary is needed to differentiate small differences in answer choices. Without this ability, fluency in English and logic is useless.</p>
<p>As @marvin100 stated, it doesn’t matter if you can apply great logic if you can’t understand the nuances of the passage. However, if you understand exactly what the passage is saying and exactly what the question is asking, you can likely apply whatever logic (strong or weak) you have and come to a conclusion.</p>
<p>Collegeboard should cut the vocab section in half or at least give less weight to it in the overall CR score, that way colleges will know better how well people can analyze (important skill in practically every real-world aspect) than spit out high-level vocabulary (which is essentially what the vocab section is).</p>
<p>Agreed, and that’s an important part of Coleman’s revisions on the 2016 test.</p>