<p>It seems like studying for the SAT(vocabulary) helps you use them in essays for school and college essays. After a rough draft, it can't hurt to go through each sentence and try to put a good SAT word like clandestine, transcend, or magnanimous.</p>
<p>It kind of gets ridiculous after the admissions office has to look up your words in a dictionary or until they realize that the student has obviously tried to use vocabulary that he or she didn't know and just wanted to use to make the essay look good. What do you guys think?</p>
<p>The general advice with college essays is to write in your own voice - i.e. if you wouldn’t say something like that in real life, don’t put it in your colelge essay. Certainly, you don’t want every single one of your sentences to contain a “difficult” word. That’s just ridiculous - not because adcoms wouldn’t understand it - but because it just sounds like you spent more time on thesaurus.com than your essay. That being said, I really don’t think that clandestine and transcend are really difficult words. Neither is magnanimous - it’s just a lot less common.</p>