<p>Many people go through the pains of studying thousands of SAT vocab words, when there are really only 2-3 actually hard vocab questions on the test. Is it worth the countless hours of studying all those words, when the ones you studied might not even be on the test?</p>
<p>I think studying vocab gives you more intuition for vocab in general…I think it can improve your scores even if the specific words you studied don’t show up on the test. The more words you know, the better you are at guessing.
You also don’t need to memorize definitions…the SAT only requires a vague/fuzzy idea of what the words mean.</p>
<p>But I agree that people devote too much time to it. There aren’t really that many vocab questions.</p>
<p>Thanks halcyon heather! It just seemed like vocab was sucking up so much time when really, I need to be working on the math portion haha!</p>
<p>I don’t really think it would be worth it to spend much time studying vocabulary, because like you said, there aren’t too many hard questions. If you really have trouble with vocab, you might be better off taking the ACT which doesn’t test it.</p>
<p>definitely study! If you’re in that upper echelon of scores (like 700+), getting one or two questions wrong can make a huge difference in what you get, so if you can get all the vocab ones right, then it makes it that much easier to get a high score. It definitely helped me. I attribute my raise from 680 to 760 pretty much all from vocab.</p>
<p>And it’s not like studying vocab has to dominate your life. I would just sit down with a stack of notecards for 20 minutes before going to bed. If you do that for a couple weeks, you can learn a ton of words.</p>
<p>And also, it’s not like you’re guessing randomly at what words will be on the test. If you learn all the words in Direct Hits, Hot Words, and Krieger’s Essentials, that’s all you really need.</p>
<p>It depends on the person. I haven’t studied any vocab and I still consistently score over 700 in critical reading. If you read a lot it especially helps.</p>
<p>Direct Hits is what I used. It has about 400 words in it. I’m not that great at CR, but on the SAT, I missed no vocab questions and I saw words from the book. I"d recommend that.</p>
<p>As my88keys mentioned, Direct Hits is great for vocab. Also take the Blue Book practice tests, and learn all the words on the vocab section that you don’t know. I did that, and I think I only missed one vocab question on the real test. Overall, I wouldn’t worry too much about it, though. There are more important things to study, not just for the SAT.</p>
<p>Some people I have talked to have found studying vocab very helpful. Others don’t need as much practice. It really depends on the individual, but I find that those who read a lot tend to need less practice.</p>