Hi.
I have 3 days before my SAT and my parents are telling me to study the vocab list on Barron’s by reading all the words once so I can recall the meaning of the words during the Writing and Language Exam questions which ask “This word could be replaced by which of the following words”. Is this a good idea?
No. This would have been mandatory in the 90s but the current version of the SAT has changed too much since then. While vocab would help with your reading comprehension, the ROI probably wont be great like in your parents day. Besides, 3 days wont do anything for you. Just take some practice tests on kaplan and look at the explanations for each answer (including the ones you got right)
No.
I am a test prep tutor. With the exception of ensuring that students understand the words “empirical” and “consequence” I never ask them to study vocabulary. Ever.
On the SAT, the number one strategy is to think of your own word and find a word that matches your thinking. Generally, words fall into two main categories. Choose the hard word you don’t know, or the easy word you do know. Always eliminate two first so that you have a 50% chance of getting it right.
I disagree with Lindagaf. SAT vocabulary is still critical because it informs the quality of the papers that you’ll write in college. SAT vocabulary was particularly useful for the 2005-2016 version of the SAT because you could save a lot of time on the reading passages if you had a strong lexicon and could cut through the sentence completion questions with ease. It’s still useful in the current version of the SAT because you don’t have to waste extra seconds looking for context clues to convey meaning, especially in the more abstruse passages, if your vocabulary is already expansive.
You should be going through the Barron’s and McGraw-Hill vocabulary lists and beginning to use those words in your high school essays. Read a TON of the classics outside of school and see how SAT-level vocabulary words have been used historically. Take an interest in the etymologies of words in the English language. If you can, take four years of French and Latin in HS; you’ll have a much clearer understanding of the Latinate cognates of a great deal of Modern English words.
This is good long-term advice to implement over years. The OP, however, had 3 days until the SAT.
(and I suspect this thread will close soon.)
You can disagree with me by all means. The fact is that there are strategies that work.
An individual student, of course, might benefit from studying words. For the purposes of preparing for the SAT, spending hours learning vocabulary is not the best use of time. There are precious few students who are interested enough to devote time to one small aspect of the SAT, in addition to the many other components of the test. The test is much more than vocabulary, and vocabulary is far more effectively learned through regular reading, not looking at vocabulary flash cards.
My proof is the hundreds of students I’ve tutored. What you did worked for you, but in my experience, very few students devote that level of commitment to a (hopefully) one off test. It’s not the MCAT or the Bar Exam.
Most importantly, no student should sacrifice academic or extracurricular time at the expense of prepping for the SAT. It’s not that important.