<p>Hey everybody! I'm back!! Now in college. Have been earning some extra money doing SAT tutoring. Took the October 09. Several CCers have sent me PM asking which vocabulary book performed the best on the October 09 SAT. Based upon what I remember and what has been verified by CCers there were 16 key level 3 - 5 vocab works. Here they are: redundancy, crystallize, polymath, lexicon, hobble, plasticity, admonition, captious, edifying, elude, slapstick. recrimination, eclectic, wry, mock, rustic. So how did the best known vocab 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>
<p>Preliminary Conclusions:</p>
<ol>
<li>The new edition of Direct Hits was the clear winner. Direct Hits had hits on redundancy, plasticity, admonition edifying, elude, eclectic, wry, mock, and rustic. </li>
<li>Students who learned Barron’s Mini-Dictionary must be very disappointed. This was Barron’s worst performance in over two years. </li>
<li>ETS really came up with some unusual words.I have yet to find a vocab book that has polymath and hobble. Even so the students I tutored all got polymath right. The question stated that Ben Franklin’s interests ranged from A to B. So he had many interests. Direct Hits had the leading distractor sycophant and of course poly would tie in with varied interests. </li>
<li>The vocabulary was really concentrated in the Sentence Completions. The passage about Women artists did have WRY, MOCK and RUSTIC for answers. DH had a great discussion on WRY. It was their 6th Word so that helped.</li>
<li>I will check other vocabulary lists when I get some more time. Good luck on tomorrow’s PSAT!!!</li>
</ol>
<p>I hope Direct Hits performs well on tomorrow’s PSAT. Do you happen to know how many indirect hits it had?</p>
<p>It had a lot of indirect hits.I am trying to compile a list. Good luck tomorrow!</p>
<p>collegeboard is throwing in some really random words. the PSAT 2009 practice had words like brainchild, which is not even in any lists.</p>