My list included 90-95% of the Oct 6 vocab, so far. . .

Test Preparation SAT Preparation
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<p>Vocabulary hounds may remember that last week I posted a huge list of words that I use at my own tutoring center. At the time I said that the list was better than all the others available but still not great. A great list with over 4000 words should mean that you know almost all the words on every exam and can get every SC right predictably. </p>

<p>Since I posted that list, I've gotten some new evidence suggesting that my list was better than I expected. First, of the 20 or so words that I've seen from the Oct 6 exam--some from this forum, others from my students--18 or so were in my list. I only found two that were not: "improvident" and "halcyon." But "provident" is in the list, and "im-" is a basic prefix meaning "not," and "im-" is in my prefix list, so I'm going to give myself credit for that one. That means I'm over the 90% mark (in other words, my list predicted over 90% of the words on the test), which was my goal, because it should equal a perfect SC score. Moreover, I recently got some old exams which I believe to be old SATs that were released as QAS packets but not published (although I can't be 100% sure), and my list predicted over 90% of that vocab as well.</p>

<p>Just to give you some basis for comparison, the Barrons list has typically predicted something like 50% of the SC vocab.</p>

<p>Who knows; it's possible that when the QAS packet comes out for the Oct exam, I'll be disappointed. Maybe I'll be under the 90% mark. But I feel optimistic. </p>

<p>The list is available, sorted by difficulty, in a post authored by me called "vocabulary offer." In the form in which I posted it, it does not have defs. Because I think it's the best list currently available for students who are trying to memorize a lot of terms, I am considering posting it somewhere else (not on this forum; it would be too long) with synonyms and eventually example sentences.</p>

<p>I have some questions for you people about the format in which it gets posted.</p>

<p>First of all, do you guys want it?
Second, I could format this list in one of three ways: alphabetically, by difficulty, or by importance. We could also do it Barrons style: alphabetically, but with difficulty and/or importance marked by little symbols. Or we could post it in several different formats. What do you want?
Third, would you all prefer it as a download or as a webpage? Or both?
Fourth, do I have any requests for translations into other languages? I can probably provide rough translations (based on an automatic translation by a computer program, not a professional translation by a human being). I will probably provide an English-Korean version at some point. I know there also may be interest in an English-Russian version. Does anyone else have a second language translation request to make? (One warning: difficult English words translated into Korean/Russian/Spanish/whatever are usually difficult words in Korean/Russian/Spanish/whatever as well, so the 1L translation may not help you as much as you expect.) These translations, if I am able to provide them, will take me some time to post, but they may be possible.
Lastly, do you people care where this goes live? I am considering just getting a blog and slapping it all up as a series of blog posts, much the way I did it here.</p>

<p>How long is this list? Well, it depends. First of all, there are two lists: the first one is a subset of the second one. The first one contains about 1900 especially important words. The second one is sorted by difficulty and it includes a number of easy words at the beginning, but it's probably 4800 words long. However, that number is deceptively big because a lot of the words are variant forms of each other: for instance, "abridge" and "abridgment" are both included. It looks to me like about every sixth word is a variation of another word that is also in the list. So if you count words like "abridge" and "abridgment" as a single term, it's more like 4000 words long. </p>

<p>Why didn't I expect this list to be particularly good in the first place? Well, vocabulary memorization is very much governed by diminishing returns: after you learn about 1500 words, you start to learn more and more vocabulary for every one additional word that you want to know on the test. I had expected a list that hit 90% of words to be bigger--maybe 7000 or 8000 terms. I had even thought that in order to hit 90%+, you might have to work backwards, eliminating words from a dictionary-sized list (usually about 30,000 words) instead of compiling a conventional SAT list.The list I posted is not reverse-engineered from the dictionary; it's based closely on words that have appeared on real CB exams in the past. I had originally been pessimistic about my chances for success with that approach (I guess it just seemed too easy); but it seems to have worked.</p>

<p>Let me know, folks.</p>

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<p>Well, this list seems pretty convenient (and useful!). I don't mind if it were available on the net live, and downloading the list via webpage (or PDF) would be just fine.</p>

<p>However, estimated roughly, if I were to use this list for the remainder of the month in order to prepare for the November exam, how many words would I have to memorize per day? Do you think a goal like this is even possible?</p>

<p>I'm interested.</p>

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<p>well done, lotf! :)</p>

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<p>To be honest, I don't know what the target audience of these humongous lists is. </p>

<p>Sentence completion is only a part of the english tests, and I'd say that the majority of people on CC can answer probably the easiest 75% of the sentence completion questions already, without too much trouble or aid. People who are not doing well on sentence completion would be better off memorizing a smaller, more concentrated list (<1000 words) because it is unrealistic that they will know EVERY single word on the test, and unlikely that they learn thousands of new words from scratch. People who are, say, around 2200(this includes the high achieving international students) may be able to gain 50 or so points by improving their vocab, but is that worth memorizing 5000 words or reading 10 new books? I don't know if it is. People shooting for 2400 typically only encounter 1, on a bad day 2, words they don't know during sentence completion. The chance of reviewing that one word by going through those huge lists is miniscule and probably not worth the effort either, honestly. The SAT will sometimes put in those quirky words .. halcyon, on the Oct test .. that probably will never ever show up again (and thus would not have been on word lists made before the test). It is your general appetite for reading and exposure to literature that can take you past the hardest vocab q.</p>

<p>I suppose it's a good idea to be well-read and have a large vocabulary for <em>life</em>, not specifically for the SAT. I know for sure that I don't want to spend an entire year memorizing vocab, however ...</p>

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<p>The target audience is, primarily, high-achieving international students and people like me (head tutors and program directors) responsible for curriculum design.</p>

<p>Many of our students learn 10 words a day over the course of a high school career. That's 3650 words a year, over 10,000 words from 9-11th grade. . . and all in 10 minutes a day. It's almost like brushing your teeth.</p>

<p>Does it make a difference? Well, think of it this way. If there are 15 SCs on the test, that's 150 points.</p>

<p>Or think of it this way: Yale accepts about 11% of students who apply early with a CR/M score between 1500 and 1550, but 33% or so of students who apply early with a CR/M score between 1550 and 1600. (Obviously correlation is no proof of causality, but I still find it interesting).</p>

<p>I sometimes help internationals raise their CR scores 250+ or even 300+ points (this year somebody went from a 350 CR to a 690 CR and probably broke 700 on the Oct exam; we've also gone from 460 or so to 720) and I can tell you that we do it in part by consistently learning a few helpful vocabulary words every day for over a year. Does it make a difference in college admissions? Yup.</p>

<p>If you read my earlier thread ("vocabulary offer"), you will see that I emphasized reading. The only problem with reading is that the strong typically get stronger and the weak get weaker, because the number of words that you learn from context is a direct function of the number of words that you already know. For that reason, I usually recommend that students be reading 15 hours a week (10 hours of reading for school, textbooks and whatever, and 5 hours pleasure reading) and also carrying a few flash cards in their pockets at all times, so that when they're waiting for the bus they can be learning some high-frequency words. </p>

<p>As I mentioned in the previous post--and maybe I should have mentioned it again here--most native speakers have absolutely no need for a huge list like this (although some could benefit from browsing through the 1900-word one). But many nonnative speakers are already attempting to memorize this many words. . . it's just that they're doing it from the wrong sources. These lists are for them.</p>

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<p>Also, Amb3r, just to clarify:</p>

<p>Somebody getting a 2200 (say, an 750M/680W/670R) would already know the vast majority of words on these lists. Nobody but a beginning ESL student would actually have to memorize 5000 words. To give you an example, I had a student who, last week, took home the shorter list (the 1900 word one) and found that she didn't know 400 of the words. She crammed them the week before the test, which usually I don't love (and I actually discouraged her from doing it ahead of time), but in any case, she said it really helped. She usually misses 6 or 7 SCs and she said this time she thought she did much better than that. So a 1900 word list, for her, translated into 400 new words, which took her about 6 hours to learn, which may have enabled her to break 700. </p>

<p>If you've already gathered the low-hanging fruit (maybe you've gotten a 100 or 120 pt improvement on the CR section) and you need just forty more points, and you usually miss 2 or 3 on the CR section, going through a big list to create your own personalized list of 500-600 new words and memorizing them can sometimes give you the extra push you need. </p>

<p>The second or third hundred points of CR improvement usually feels like an uphill slog, but some people find it worth the trouble.</p>

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<p>Whoa that's alot of words. I memorized maybe less than 1000 and i recognized every single word on the test. If i didnt, a simple elimination process quickly brought me to the answer. I dont have the patience to memorize 4000 words, but who knows maybe some people do. That's just me</p>

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<p>Disclaimer! Disclaimer!</p>

<p>Now I am really wishing I put this at the beginning of the thread.</p>

<p>I am not suggesting that everyone should memorize thousands of words.</p>

<p>I am going to quote from <em>my own introductory post</em> at the beginning of my original thread:</p>

<p>"I have my own 5000 word list. <em>This is primarily for international students with more than a year to prepare</em>; the rest of you should be reading and/or doing practice problems. If you are a native speaker with a strong vocabulary, you should probably learn a high-frequency list (like mine or Barrons's or PR's) of about 700 words and then focus on practice problems."</p>

<p>That advice still holds. But it does not apply to everybody.</p>

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<p>Hi GardenMaiden, </p>

<p>Well, first you'd have to figure out how many of the words you already knew. Let me see. I would start with the 1900 word list, but you will know a lot of them already. If you tell me your last CR score I will try to make a guess about how many words would be new to you. If you are in the 600s, you might need to learn 25-30% of the words; that's about 500-600. I'd try to do forty new words a day in order to have some time to review. Depending on how experienced you are at memorization, that might take you forty minutes to an hour.</p>

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<p>loft629,</p>

<p>Thanks for your input. Horrible as it is, my last CR score as of June 07 was a 460 =___=;</p>

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<p>Was the June 1 your first test? Are you a senior?</p>

<p>You are probably answering too many questions. I bet you should be skipping more. Very often, people in the 400s can hit the 500s just by filling in fewer questions. </p>

<p>I'll post the 1900 list somewhere in the next couple days and you can take a look at it. </p>

<p>I bet you should learn some of those words, but not all of them, and then do lots of practice tests.</p>

<p>Have you done lots of practice tests yet?</p>

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<p>I am not a native speaker, and i feel that is to my disadvantage. However, i feel the BEST BOOK, i repeat BEST BOOK (i havent gotten my score for oct back yet of course, but im feeling a 760 or above) is Barrons 2400, maybe barrons CR workbook. I didnt like the workbook as much, the passages were rediculously difficult, about 10 times harder than any Oct passage. They suggest you break down the passage, many people say it's a bad idea, for me, who can't concentrate on 2 long passages, breaking down was the best thing that has ever happened to me. </p>

<p>Anyways GL. Just remmeber as you are taking the CR...... it's a open book test. The answer is right in front of you in the passage. When i think of that, i go back and read carefully, and makes me less encouraged, and then i usually go "oh wow, the answer is clearly this"</p>

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<p>loft629,</p>

<p>I really appreciate your generousity and help. :) Thanks for the vocab list offer.</p>

<p>Yes, June 1st (2nd actually) was my first SAT attempt. I'm now a senior and taking my second and hopefully LAST SAT in November - 25 days time. </p>

<p>Well, believe it or not, the portion in the Critical Reading section that I have trouble with the most is the passages. The short passages are okay sometimes, but the long ones are horrid with me. I'm an average (a bit slow I guess) reader, so I'm trying to do practice questions without reading the passages (I'm a terrible skimmer too..I've tried so many times to skim, but it just doesn't help me at all). So this is the area I struggle with the most. SC's are 50/50 with me..I don't know really..I guess it depends on whether I know all of the words in the answer choices or not.</p>

<p>Well..eh..I haven't been doing much practice tests if not at all to tell you the truth ^^;...yes, I know I should be doing them, so I am trying to start up on that habit. I think I'll try to do a practice test a day starting from tomorrow and up until the test date. Maybe that'll boost my scores in such a short amount of time (my M/WR scores on my first SAT were 510 and 580 respectively) and I believe I'll be able to master those sections at a much quicker pace than I will for Critical Reading. What do you think?</p>

<p>There's one other problem I'm having when it comes to studying for the SAT these couple of days and that is organization. I have SO much prep stuff and yet I do not know how to organize my time to get everything covered..I was wondering if you could help me out? ^_^; I could pm you the post I made earlier regarding this issue if you want.</p>

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<p>i agree with you it was a mess. i thought the best thing was just to do words every day, while wokring on sections one at a time, then taking practice scetions.</p>

<p>Like i said, if the long passages get you down, i would make line references int eh passage, and break down the passage, answering questions every 2 paragraphs or so</p>

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<p>I doubt I can remember words that I only spend 10 mins of my life for. I heard you have to go over one word at least 7 different times in order to make it a part of your vocabulary.</p>

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<p>Ok here was my perfect way of memorizing (maybe it's just me?) Notecards...... no don't work for me. Mnemonic devices......... some times. All i did was get a 600 most used words and just go through a letter a day, just plain old memorizng them. Of course, you must be like...... how'd you remember them. Maybe it's just me, but when i see them on a test or something, it triggers my memory</p>

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<p>@Harvard44: you're right about the 7 times. Or at least, I read one formal study that said you have to encounter a word 6 times or more to remember it.</p>

<p>@xitammarg: thank you! :) </p>

<p>@GardenMaiden: typically, students in the 400s are answering too many questions and struggling to understand main ideas.</p>

<p>If I were you, I might put some words on flash cards so that you have something useful to do for the SAT while you're in the car/the bus/the subway, but I think by far the majority of your practice time should come from doing practice problems. </p>

<p>You should begin taking practice sections as often as you can. For now, consider skipping as many as 1/3 of the questions. If this seems like a huge risk, take a test the way you ordinarily would, but mark all the questions that you <em>would</em> skip if you <em>had</em> to skip 1/3 of the questions. Then grade the test both ways: as if you had skipped, and as if you hadn't skipped. In particular, consider skipping the inference questions (the ones that contain words like "suggest," "imply," "assume" or "assumption") unless you really feel confident of your choice.</p>

<p>When you read, skip the middle of the supporting paragraphs. Read the introduction, the first and last sentence of each supporting paragraph, and the conclusion. If you can, underline a main idea sentence in both the introduction and the conclusion. Try "reading selectively" instead of "skimming."</p>

<p>If you are doing your tests section-by-section (because you don't have time for full exams), figure out which type of passage you're best at (science? humanities?) and, for now, focus on that type of passage. As you become more confident (or as you get closer to the test, maybe in two weeks), start working through the more difficult passage types.</p>

<p>That's my immediate advice for you. I'd say that your best shot is in a) answering fewer questions (in particular skipping the inference ones), b) learning <em>a few</em> more words (but not focusing on vocab), and c) learning to identify and understand main ideas. All of this will come with practice.</p>

<p>As far as getting organized: hmmmmm. I think the most important thing you can do is to make the Blue Book the very center of your study strategy. When you get a Blue Book question wrong and you can't figure out why, then you might take a look at the other materials that you have, but I would treat them as references. I do agree with Kevinscool that Barrons 2400 is very good, so if you have it, I'd read it over. However, Barrons 2400 is mostly for students like Kevinscool: students who were already doing pretty well who want to rock the test. (Kevinscool, maybe I'm wrong about you, but that's the type of student you sound like to me: somebody whose first practice SAT score was 620-650ish? Maybe not though.) If you have PR, I'd read that one. Basically I guess I would read all of the test materials you have, <em>just once</em>, decide which one seems to make the most sense to you personally, and then use only one guide and the Blue Book. </p>

<p>I do agree that M and W are typically a little easier to improve.</p>

<p>If you have more specific questions, shoot me a PM.</p>

<p>I'm going to post my long list(s) with defs somewhere by the end of this week.</p>

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<p>I got about a 620 my first time taking it going in unprepared. I usually scored about 650-700 on my practice tests. Then i read barron. I did take the 8th practice test in the blue book, and the passages were extremely hard to follow, so i have no idea where i am at when i took October's test. I feel good about it. However, i feel that no matter where you are at, and i can be totally wrong, breaking down the passages and looking specifically for answers works best. Of course, i read fast enough to have the time to do that. </p>

<p>CR can be a drag, and i never liked it. What really helped me was eliminating obvious wrong answers, then you would come to 2 maybe 3 answers that looked right. If you ever get it down so you have time, spend time rereading the line references, ANYTHING disproving one makes the choice false. </p>

<p>But if you are a international student (see im not a native speaker and speak another language at home, but i am exposed to english at school), I can definitely see the disadvantage and frustration. Practice looking for the answers in the practice tests, and i'm sure wherever you apply, they will take into consideration that you are not a native speaker. Gl, and hopefully one day you can give those damn passages what they deserve :)</p>

<p>oh ya one last thing. If the passage is hard to understand or whatnot, like lotf said, that could be your problem if you are scoring in the 400s. Reading 2 paragraphs and answering the questions that deal with them can make them much more understandable, you only have to comprehend 2 paragraphs, instead of 4 or 5.</p>

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<p>I am using the word list frm barron but I am studying in a way I find time consuming. I use american heritage and webster's online dictionary to refer the word meanings and jotting thm down, and frankly, it is slowing me a lot. Is using a dictionary important here or should I just depend on the word list for the given meanings.</p>

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<p>Go with word list. Pedestrian is average to the SAT. Table is to hold off to the SAT. You get the point. What i studied was like 660 words off the underground guide to the sat. They have funny sentences which help you remmeber. Barrons...........not so much, they give you terse definitions with no sentences</p>