<p>October SATs is slowly creeping up on us, and my reading score is still sub 600. In order to climb over the 600 mountain, I had been doing lots and lots of CR practice tests, only to find myself not improving and recently, regressing :( So i came to the conclusion that reading skillz cannot be acquired in less than 4 weeks, and I plan to concentrate on improving my sentence completions. I usually get about 2 SC wrong per section and overall 6 wrong for the whole CR test. As I was staring at the thick stack of papers containing SAT vocabulary on them, I began to question if it is truly worth it. I mean studying 1000 words and only to have 15 that you truely have to know is kinda ridiculous. Any advices on memorizing vocab or suggestions for vocab lists.</p>
<p>I have:
Kaplan 2008 Prep Book (500 Words)
Sparknotes (1000 Words)
Barrons CR Work Book
Barrons 2400 (Some higher level SAT words)
Kaplan Raise Your Score Even More Book (1000 Words)</p>
<p>^I think you should focus on improving the reading passages for the most part.
The vocab is typically pretty simple and only a big part if you're aiming for the 750+ range. I think at a certain point, the CR will start clicking for you/should start clicking for you. Just don't over practice CR, because you might start getting super bored with it. Ease the practice in. </p>
<p>So yeah, to answer your question, you shouldn't spend that much time on vocab, but rather spend your time doing overall CR practice, and ,most importantly, developing your passage reading.
Oh and,,,I don't think it's that necessary to memorize 1000 words unless you have a really bad vocabulary base. I think the Rocket Review Word and List and Direct Hits are probably the most efficient.</p>
<p>For passage-based reading, try Grammatix' strategy. It doesn't work for anybody, but if it works for you, you may improve extremely fast.</p>
<p>Anyway, I think you have a better chance improving your reading skills rather than cramming vocabulary. First of all, as you said, you may learn 900 words and every word on the test to be from the other 100 words you didn't learn. Or, they may be words which are not on any list. Or, you may forget many of them because there are too many in so little time. A better long-term strategy would be to read a lot, but there is no time for this now. Try thinking of similar words, identify prefixxes, or make connections with foreign language words. Getting used to it may lead to more points at sentence correction than cramming vocab.</p>
<p>I am going to memorize all the 3500 words in Barron`s how to prepare....
DOnt say it is pointless.It is very difficult and time-consuming but if i know all the 3500 words this guarantees me 720+ on CR.And the words also help you building a better essay.</p>
<p>^The reading part of the SAT is mostly composed of the passage reading questions, if you are able to get all of those correct, then a 720+ is guaranteed. Memorizing 3500 words takes a whole lot of time, a lot of which you probably wont be able to retain. It's good to develop a good vocabulary base and then hope you get lucky with the vocab..</p>
<p>honesty memorizing words alone never helped increase my scores. At most it truly helped me answer 2 questions that I would absolutely never else been able to answer otherwise. Rather I found it more effective to READ, as has been said multiple times before, and having heard before in context I could determine if it "sounded" right. </p>
<p>
[quote]
Ivan_Stanchev, what a dolt you should [?] be to think that "intriguant" is a word.</p>
<p>Quote:
Originally Posted by Ivan_Stanchev
You are an intriguant.And you probably play WoW more than 10 hours a day.
[/quote]
Oh ****!</p>
<p>Anyway, no, I don't think there is a point in memorizing vocabulary. Read more books and you will be familiar with the words in context, which is all you need.</p>