<p>SilverTurtle's guide offers three sources of vocab: Direct Hits Vol. 1 and 2 and two vocab lists one of 5000 words and the other 1000. I planned out how many words a day I would need to memorize between now and october and it's a little over 50. I feel like that is too much time invested on maybe a couple problems on the CR section which isn't all that important to me since I'm going for Georgia Tech. (My current CR is 670 but I want it to be above 700). Would it be better for me to just use the direct hits books and forego the two large lists? SilverTurtle even said they may not be worth the opportunity cost.</p>
<p>well it definitely can’t hurt. I sure wish I had memorized more, because those problems can make a huge difference in your score. Because of the vocab, I got a 680 CR. I got 4 of the vocab ones wrong, and 3 reading ones wrong and 1 omitted, so if I had known all the vocab, I would have gotten almost a 750, which would have brought me up to a 2300+, so learning vocab is probably a good idea.</p>
<p>This is all you will need</p>
<p>[Hot</a> Words for the SAT](<a href=“http://webserver.nccsc.k12.in.us/hsmedia/hot_words_SAT.htm]Hot”>http://webserver.nccsc.k12.in.us/hsmedia/hot_words_SAT.htm)</p>
<p>Even though the vocabs only account for a small proportion of your score, it’s still best to learn them incessantly since you’ll never know what collegeboard will throw at the takers. So, my advice is: learn the words but don’t study too much on this. Set aside 30 mins to remember about 20-30 words a day, which I think is the limit since the human brain cannot perceive lots of information without forgetting a fair amount of it. The remain of your time should be spent on practice tests.</p>
<p>Memorize tons of vocab. 50 a day isn’t a lot. There are 19 sentcoms and <em>many</em> other questions that rely on vocab knowledge (actually, virtually all passage Qs rely on vocab, since the answers are paraphrases/restatements of lines in the passages).</p>
<p>SATman111 is right. Vocab is crucial for scoring above a 650 and especially for scoring
above a 700. The CR scales have gotten really harsh. Silverturtle’s vocabulary recommendation needs to be updated. I think the Essential 500 Words is better than Direct Hits for actually generating hits on recent SATs.</p>
<p>If I studied both essential and direct hits, would that be enough? I was just wondering if it was necessary to go through the 5,000 and 1,000 word lists.</p>