<p>Hey everybody! I'm back! Now in college. Have been doing some SAT tutoring to earn money. Took the October 089 SAT. Several CCers have sent me PMs asking which vocabulary book performed best on the October 09 SAT. Based upon what I remember and what was posted on CC there were 16 key level 3 - 5 vocabulary words. Here they are:
redundancy, crystallize, polymath, lexicon, hobble, plasticity, admonition, captious, edifying, elude, slapstick, recrimination, eclectic, wry, mock, and rustic. So how did the best known vocabulary books perform? Here is my preliminary report:</p>
<ol>
<li>Direct Hits: 400 Words/9 Hits/1 Hit per 44 words</li>
<li>TestMasters: 254 Words/2 Hits/1 Hit per 127 words</li>
<li>Princeton Review: 253 Words/2 Hits/1 Hit per 127 words</li>
<li>Hot Words: 396 Words/3 Hits/1 Hit per 132 words</li>
<li>Rocket Review: 323 Words/2 Hits/1 Hit per 161 words</li>
<li>Barron's Mini Dictionary: 3500 Words/ 9 Hits/1 Hit per 388 words</li>
</ol>
<ol>
<li>The new edition of Direct Hits was the clear winner. DH had hits on redundancy, plasticity, admonition, edifying, elude, eclectic, wry, mock, and rustic.</li>
<li>Students who memorized Barron’s Mini-Dictionary must be really upset. This was Barron’s worst performance in over two years (maybe ever).</li>
<li>ETS really came up with some unusual words. I have yet to find a list containing polymath and hobble. Even so the students I tutored got polymath right. The question stated that Ben Franklin had varied interests. DH had the leading distractors (sycophant) and of course poly would connect with interests.</li>
<li>The vocabulary was concentrated in the SCs. The passage about women artists did have WRY, MOCK, and RUSTIC for answers. DH has a great discussion on WRY which really helped.</li>
<li>I will check out some other vocab lists later. Good luck on tomorrow’s PSAT!!!</li>
</ol>
<p>I have to say, though, that even though Princeton’s Hit Parade and Rocket Review’s Core Words, among other common word lists, did not perform very well on the Oct test, they do feature a large number of INDIRECT hits. These hits definitely expediate the process of elimination (POE)!</p>
<p>what’s helped for me is not vocab books (though i did use some), but etymology. in the three times i’ve taken the SAT i’ve missed one vocab question. however i’ve never taken a latin class but i do take a foreign romance language. what i do is that if i don’t know a word i think of other words with similar roots and look at those definitions.</p>
<p>on this last test, i did it with polymath (multiple + academic), admonish (monish is related monitor which means to watch over, which is close to warn), edifiying (sounds like edifice, which means to build up a building in its root form, hence its close to “instruct” as instruction many times is building up skill), and for a few others.</p>
<p>My fave Word-Nerd.com actually has polymath - one of my tutoring students mentioned that one to me a while back and I thought it was pretty obscure, but I guess not too obscure! Don’t know about the hits on the others, but I’ll check at some point. My students seemed to feel pretty prepared, but I haven’t gotten feedback from many of them about the vocab. Lots of complaints about the passages, though!</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s really fair to say that Direct hits has only 400 words… while they give 400 definitions, there are sometimes multiple vocabulary words for each definition. They’ll say “word A, word B, and word C all mean this” and count that as one vocab word. In actuality, I’d say that there are around 500 words.</p>
<p>They are still the best vocab book though. I love my copy <3 <3</p>