<p>@marvin100 did he indicate he will release any samples in the near future? I;m somewhat excited to see how CR may be less of a memorization contest, than a gradual process of reading many books and other materials.</p>
<p>Nothing has been announced about samples as far as I know. Iām excited to see it too. I donāt expect it will be that different for preppers, but hey, change is fun, and itās not like itās a great test as currently written.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>Well, Marvin, should that not depend on the particular list and the ā¦ relevance to an answer in the test? Not every word that appears on the test is relevant to an answer. </p>
<p>SOS, read my posts about HOW to develop the SAT vocabulary and what I wrote about LISTS. </p>
<p>@xiggi: Well, Marvin, should that not depend on the particular list and the ā¦ relevance to an answer in the test? Not every word that appears on the test is relevant to an answer.</p>
<p>Yes and no. Obviously some lists are better than others (that awful 3500 word Barronās list? Oof.), but there are lots of decent lists online and many that have been recommended on CC. My experience is that there are about 6000-7000 words the CB can draw from but at least 4000 of them are not āSAT wordsā that virtually everyone knows already (āescape,ā ābully,ā ālenient,ā for example), so 2000-3000 is a good number of words to learn. Most students probably know some percentage of those, as well. Now your prescription (study the tests and make word lists based on them) is fine, but there are already Quizlet sets in which other people have done that legwork for you. There are also very solid vocab resources like Word Smart that will provide a great start. Itās reductive to characterize the options as simply ādonāt memorize words from listsā vs. āmemorize a dumb list in a dumb way.ā</p>
<p>Unfortunately, the Barronās and a couple of 5000 wordsā lists are the standard here when people embark on memorizing vocabulary. I have posted repeatedly about their degree of relevance in the past years. Direct Hits culled its words from past tests and added some of the necessary context. </p>
<p>For the record, the proactive review or simple reading of released test is NOT for the sole purpose of learning the relevant vocabulary. That part is the bonus. The real objective is to acquire the techniques to recognize the format and patterns of the questions. </p>
<p>The inappropriate focus on the real problems is what contributes to the often reported inability to improve the CR scores. Most reports of that kind are from people who spend hours slaving over lists or flipping little cards! </p>
<p>āMost reports of that kind are from people who spend hours slaving over lists or flipping little cards!ā</p>
<p>Really? Most such reports I see on here is people who donāt know vocab or think memorizing a few hundred words is enough. Itās virtually impossible to get below a 650 if you know the vocab.</p>
<p>@marvin100 how do people memorize 1000+ vocab anyways? If you donāt find most of them in some sort of meaningful context (like books and magazines), Iām guessing youāll forget and have to re-memorize all over again.</p>
<p>@Jarjarbinks23ā Well I am an international student and after a year of arduously torturing my mind, I have managed to memorise nearly 4000 words. But thatās to say, I must do so only to catch up with domestic students because being a non-native speaker, I was in a huge disadvantage
Yet in return, Iām now no longer afraid CR lol. </p>
<p>@Jarjarbinks23ā I understand why you would be āguessingā that, but your guess doesnāt match my experience. If kids review enough, and frequently enough (combining sets and using LEARN on Quizlet is amazing for thisāas is Leitner Box or any other form of Spaced Repetition), itās absolutely possible to embed around 800-1200 words a week in their long-term memory. Itās not fun, itās not pleasant, itās not as āgoodā as having read hundreds of books over the years, but it does work.</p>
<p>@marvin100ā btw may I ask where are you tutoring?</p>
<p>I PMād you, but I donāt like to talk about details on here, and I certainly donāt want to self-promote. On CC, Iām tryingālike xiggi and everyone else is!āto help everyone I can.</p>
<p>Any time spent memorizing words is better spent doing practice tests. I have an average vocabulary and I miss about 1 CR question per test due to not knowing a word. Itās just not worth it.</p>
<p>People erroneously cling to the vocab lists because itās a more tangible way of measuring progress than getting better at picking out ideas from passages. </p>
<p>@BassGuitar maybe itās a ego-thing tooā¦ maybe thereās some sort of internal p!ssing match going on where the brain is going āLooking at how much I can memorize! I must be the bomb at CR, wouldnāt I!ā </p>
<p>@Jarjarbinks23ā I donāt think anyone can be proud of their memorizing a lot of vocabs. People who try to study a lot of words just because their vocabs are not good enough (esp inlt students like me). I always envy of native students who donāt need to study much but still ace CR lol.</p>
<p>Yeah, studying vocab is the worst. But it works. If you can get a good score w/o it, then donāt do it. But if youāre sub-650, I guarantee vocab is a major part of the problemāvocab isnāt just sentcomsā¦</p>
<p>^^^
I hate to beat the proverbial equine to death, but Iād like to revisit the issue of learning additional vocabulary. We all know that native students who learned the joy of reading as a kid will do better in the CR than students who did not learn to read critically or did not learn English as a first language. </p>
<p>Then we need to separate the issue of vocabulary versus critical reading. Some ESL students do have the ability to understand and dissect sentences in their mother tongue but have issues with a deep vocabulary and issues with secondary meanings of words such as ātableā or 'low." </p>
<p>The real pragmatic question is how to we go about changing the fortunes of students. Letās assume that in our arsenal of SAT weapons, we have 30 to 40 official tests as well as access to the usual suspects such as Barronās for wordlists. Do not PM to know where to find 30-40 tests. Anyone willing to learn 3500 words should be able to google this site and others to find the stories about finding tests. And, fwiw, the total of the old SAT books between white, red, and blue versions are getting you to a total bigger than needed! </p>
<p>So, letās take the older āredā book. Some, in the past, have developed lists of most the words that appeared in this old favorite, and might have upgraded the lists with the post 2005 versions. The results represent a compendium of many such words. Thus, reading and memorizing such lists should be beneficial. Unfortunately, the Barronās list that was a GRE recycled is not as refined. Actually, I think it is pure garbage, but I digress. </p>
<p>Now, we have the option of learning 2000 words. Assuming a 50 words a week challenge of one hour, it would take 40 weeks or 40 hours. Might work for some! I get that! </p>
<p>But what if you simply READ the old red tests (Has CR changed much?) with the answers in front of you and your trusty dictionary. Along the way, mark the unknown words, look them up, look up prefixes and suffixes, and identify the patterns of the questions. How long would that take? I think that the same 40 hours would be plenty. Will you catch ALL the words that might appear in the future? Nope, but NONE OF THE LISTS come close to such lofty objective. And by a fair margin! </p>
<p>The point here is to maximize oneās time. If a student in his freshman year embarks on a 2-3 year project ā¦ by all means ā¦ spend time learning the lists, and why not the entire dictionary! It can only help. On the other hand, if you have limited but reasonable time, my recommendation is to invest the time working to a format that is similar to the future exam and build your base from those older tests. </p>
<p>Obviously, one could simply use the Blue Book as basis and work through released QAS for the testing phase. </p>
<p>HTH</p>
<p>āNow, we have the option of learning 2000 words. Assuming a 50 words a week challenge of one hour, it would take 40 weeks or 40 hours. Might work for some! I get that!ā</p>
<p>The horse is dead, and yet I still find myself with some energy. So here I am again.</p>
<p>50 words a week? Motivated students should be able to do 500 words a week with little difficulty. Solving tests without knowing vocab is just guessing. Until a student knows a lot of vocab (and of course some students start out knowing a lot of vocab!), she canāt really solve; she can only guess.</p>
<p>Practicing guessing on tests is the waste of time. Learning words is efficient, if onerous, but once words are learned, then solving is actually practice rather than an exercise in guessing what sentences mean.</p>
<p>^^</p>
<p>Critical reading? </p>
<p>Perhaps it would help to read my posts with closer attention. There is no solving nor guessing involved in what I described. Just a more efficient method to learn words in the right context, learn the patterns of the test, and NOT waste time. </p>
<p>Fwiw, 50 or 500 words a week make no difference. Itās all about the rate. ArĆ© you trying to convincente me that people retain 500 words per ā¦ hour? Iāll keep my 50 words per HOUR, if you do not mind! </p>
<p>But I am happy to admit that students who are below middle school level in English MIGHT find the use of silly lists beneficial. </p>
<p>I have found that a few weeks of intense study during a vacation is a more viable plan for most students than a long-term plan of 50 words per week (which requires planning and sustained willpower), and it also allows for plenty of time to review and refresh (perhaps an hour a week would suffice!). This may not be true for everyone; Iām certainly willing to admit there are some organized, disciplined students for whom a slow, long-term plan MIGHT be preferable. I just havenāt met very many of them.</p>
<p>Iām not really trying to āconvincenteā you of anything; Iām trying to help students who donāt yet have satisfactory scores. And the fact remains: anyone under 600 unequivocally needs vocab. Iāve seen maybe 3-4 students ever (out of nearly 10,000 students over the years) who knew vocab and couldnāt get a 650 in CR, and they all suffered from extremely poor reading comprehension and/or fluency. </p>
<p>Since the CR national average is well below 600, and the vast majority of test-takers donāt have serious fluency problems, it follows that most students could benefit a lot from memorizing a few thousand words, that doing so may be time consuming and boring but is well within the ability of literally anyone, and that the claim that memorizing vocab is a waste of time is not only inaccurate in most cases but also runs the risk of denying the vast majority of students their most accessible and efficient tool for rapid score increase.</p>
<p>Whatās more, any student who still misses sentcoms <em>at all</em> is still at risk of losing very easy points when the solution is simply a matter of drudgery, with no particular intelligence, aptitude, or skill required. Thereās nothing worse than seeing a kid who reads well miss her goal because of sentcoms. Iāve also found that any student who even occasionally misses sentcoms is almost certainly also missing passage questions because of vocab weaknesses.</p>
<p>Then again, maybe we actually agree: what you describeālearning 2000 words that compiled from the Red Book and the post-2005 released examsāis starting to sound a lot like what I prescribe. If your only complaint about memorizing vocab is that some may use inefficient lists (Barronās, Iām looking at you again), then the goalposts have been moved to a place Iām comfortable with. In fact, they look pretty nice over there.</p>