<p>One last thing to consider is reading speed. According to a handout developed by Cornell and provided by Harvard to its students (via the Bureau of Study Counsel website), you should be able to read dense, complex material up to 300 wpm; normal, expository text at 300-600 wpm; and light entertaining material at 500+ wpm. You should also be able to skim 600+ wpm. In my opinion, these are pretty good goals. I think all the students I know personally who have perfect CR scores are able to read 300-600 wpm and scan 600+ wpm. I know that you don't have to have these reading speeds to get a perfect score, but it sure helps. The correlation is very high in my experience. </p>
<p>If you have some time to go. . . like a year or more. . . or you're a parent or tutor. . . I'd suggest helping your student choose books from the list above and, if necessary, working on reading speed. Being able to read fast makes reading a lot more fun.</p>
<p>If you find this list helpful, here's what you can do for me. Tell me your background (for instance, if you're not a native speaker, what your first lg is), how you intend to use the list, how you wish it were different, and what other lists you're using. I'm trying to get a sense of the world outside my own little institution (and my friends' institutions).</p>
<p>How many of you would seriously consider learning all 6000 words on the list, for instance? Are any of you going to try? How long do you have? How do you plan to go about it?</p>
<p>I would seriously appreciate any info you can give me!</p>
<p>This list appears to have predicted 90-95% of the words on the Oct. test (that's enough to get all the SCs correct, of course). I won't know that for sure until the QAS is out, but that's what it looks like from posts here and from my own students' feedback.</p>
<p>I posted a new thread as an update to this post.</p>
<p>I will also say that I've got a list of 1900 words (a subset of the huge list) which is probably a good fit for native speakers who are struggling with the SCs. I'll probably provide that one pretty quick.</p>
<p>I guess the answer to that is "yes and no."</p>
<p>I am the Program Director of an SAT prep program on the East Coast (in Boston). I supervise six other tutors, most of whom are Harvard and MIT undergrads, and I teach a lot of kids from selective college prep schools like Milton and St. Paul's. I graduated from Harvard (English lit) in 2002 and am back at Harvard for graduate school (will be applying to PhD programs next year), so in that sense I am a student. And I am very curious about words, so I do find this fun. But the reason I compiled these lists is to help my own students, most of whom are internationals applying to highly selective colleges (Ivies etc). Having the very best vocabulary lists possible is extremely important to ensuring the success of my own students.</p>
<p>If you search for my user ID you will see that I post a lot on this forum answering questions, etc.</p>
<p>At the same time, I finished this list on my own time and at my own expense, while employed as a contract worker, so it's mine to give away (it's my personal IP and not the academy's). And I do believe that anyone who is willing to memorize thousands of words should have access to the very best lists available. So I thought it would be fun to open it up and give it away.</p>
<p>The defs and synonyms still need to be edited, but they're better than nothing. The defs come from a Princeton research project (used by permission): they're dictionary-style defs, so they're sometimes a little arcane. I'm going to keep refining over the coming weeks and months.</p>
<p>In the meantime, if you are one of the people who was interested in the list and you decide to check it out, please PM me if you have any suggestions about making it better (other than the obvious that the defs and syns still need editing).</p>
<p>I added a blog to the webpage for my own students so that I could post edited definitions and mnemonics (memorable sentences) as I had time to write them. I also added a few short articles about memorizing words. If anyone would like to follow along with the mnemonics, they are becoming available at blog.sesamewords.com.</p>
<p>Thank God that I found your posts! I'm an int'l student, and I'm a senior in H.S. now. I took SAT in Oct and I did really bad on Critical Reading, because I gridded something wrong. I got 600. I was just thinking about whether I should retake the test, because I'm not sure whether I can really get a higher score for the second time, and then I see your word lists! This truly encouraged me to take a second shot!! Thanks!!</p>
<p>not to be a party pooper, but studying vocab words is draining and completely pointless, instead of trying to memorize a bunch of words that you probably will forget anyways, just take as many vocab practices as you can. the SAT creators dont do hard words that stump everyone, they choose words that lie in context, if you do enough of the problems you begin to see what words they are looking for rather than the "correct" word and you'll end up scoring much higher.</p>
<p>Everybody has a method that works for them. It sounds like your method is doing lots of practice problems, and that should be a big part of anyone's plan, I think.</p>
<p>At the same time, every single test prep book I'm aware of--every single one--suggests that students memorize at least a small list. International students may need to memorize a lot more. </p>
<p>On the one hand, I think you're on to something: practice problems rock. On the other hand, I think you're generalizing a little bit too much from your own experience. Learning words can be huge for some people.</p>