<p>I disagree. I have no other way of telling you why I disagree than to tell you this: I didn’t get an 80 on the Writing MC by learning and memorizing grammar rules. With rare exceptions (most of which occurred in my junior year after I took the SAT), I’ve never learned anything about grammar in school, aside from the fancy names for everything. Most of the grammatical rules that we learn in class are just common sense to me. Instead, I was able to notice the errors in the sentences because, as a function of having a firm grasp on the English language, the errors were clear to me. I didn’t think, “hey, we learned in school that the subject and verb should agree!!!”; I was able to recognize this (no doubt from a young age) by having read books and picked up on patterns. </p>
<p>“I have NEVER learned any grammar. The only grammatical rules I abide by is weather it sounds ‘right’ or not.”
Exactly. And on what is this instinct based? The grammatical rules that you’ve picked up on by reading.</p>
<p>“you can’t really pick up something you have never seen before.”
I don’t want to turn this personal, but again, I disagree based on my own experience. I didn’t get an 800 on CR by memorizing vocab; I just happened to know most of the words that showed up on the test. When I didn’t know a word, usually I knew the other choices or could make a reasonable guess based on what the word sounded like it may mean. </p>
<p>I don’t think that lower scorers have “never seen” these words before; I think that they have failed to retain the words they’ve seen as well as higher scorers. Of course, information retention is a function of how much exposure one has gotten to a certain topic, which is why avid readers typically do better in CR. (I read a lot in elementary and middle school, for the record. I guess I “learned more” and had an unfair advantage in taking the SAT… sorry. You’re right; my score is far less impressive than that of someone who is illiterate.) </p>
<p>That said, I don’t think that the SAT is representative of intelligence. I just think that the “your SAT score depends on what you’ve been directly exposed to” argument has holes.</p>