The SAT Prep Black Book(51)

In my experience, after having worked with tens of thousands of students from a variety of educational backgrounds and through a variety of media and formats, I can say that, on average, most test-takers will encounter somewhere between 2 and 8 questions per test in which challenging vocabulary actually poses a serious obstacle.

So we’d be potentially talking about memorizing anywhere from hundreds to thousands of words in order to have a better chance—hopefully—of answering maybe a half-dozen questions or so on the actual day of the test. When we consider that there are so many easier, more reliable ways of improving performance on other areas of the test, it’s a little ridiculous, in my opinion, to devote all that memorization effort to the hope that it might help us answer 6 more questions correctly.

And that reminds me—there’s no guarantee that the words you memorize will actually be the words that trouble you on test day, because the test isn’t standardized for vocabulary anyway.





Knowing The Words Doesn’t Guarantee A Right Answer, And Not Knowing Them Doesn’t Prevent One


More times than I could possibly count, I have seen people miss Sentence Completion questions even when they knew all of the necessary words. This tends to happen for two reasons: either the person didn’t know how Sentence Completion questions on the SAT were designed, or the person didn’t read the question carefully enough. (Remember: it’s not by accident that the College Board calls the part of the test with the Sentence Completion questions the “Critical Reading” section.)

I have also seen students find clever ways to work around holes in their vocabulary, in order to find correct answers with certainty, even when they might not have known all (or any) of the words in the answer choices before answering the question. This can’t be done in every case, of course, but it can be done much more often than most people think.

The prevalence of both types of scenarios (people missing questions when they know the words, and people getting questions right when they don’t know all the words) strongly supports the idea that these questions are not primarily about vocabulary, and that memorizing definitions is generally a waste of time and energy, at least for the SAT.





It’s Often Possible To Score Above 750 While Omitting 3 Or 4 Questions


A lot of people don’t realize this, but the “curve” on the Critical Reading section is typically much more generous than the one on the Math section. Often, you can miss a question (sometimes even 2) and still have a “perfect” 800 on the section. In fact, if your goal is to be above a 750, your cushion might be a handful of questions. If you want to be in the 650+ range, you can often omit a dozen or so questions, assuming all of the answers you do mark are correct.

So it’s not the case that you’ll need to answer every single Sentence Completion question correctly in order to have any hope of an elite score on this section of the test.





Memorizing Definitions Is A Bad Way To Learn Vocabulary Anyhow


One of the dirty little secrets of the vocabulary business is that forced memorization doesn’t usually help people learn vocabulary anyway—at least, not in an ideal way.

Time after time, I’ve had students remark to me that they know they memorized the definition of a particular word once, but they can no longer recall what it means. Sometimes, even when they do think they recall a word’s definition, they’re wrong—either because they’re remembering incorrectly, or because the definition they memorized was incorrect or inexact in the first place.

This happens because our brains aren’t designed to think of the words in our vocabularies as entries in a database, as things that can be memorized efficiently from flashcards. Think about the words that you feel comfortable with, and how you learned them. Nobody ever sat you down and taught you the word “table” with a flashcard. You learned the word “table” by living in and around people who used the word consistently and correctly, and you automatically picked up its meaning because that’s what your brain was designed to do: extract the meaning of a particular word through repeated exposure in its correct context. Think about all the other words and phrases you’ve probably learned over the past few weeks or months: nicknames for celebrities, the names of popular dances, specialized techniques for playing an instrument or a video game, who knows what. In every case, I’m willing to bet that you learned these words without giving them much thought. You just picked them up because they were constantly around you, and because you actually cared what they meant.

Now contrast this with the plight of someone trying to memorize the definition of the word “ameliorate” off the back of a flashcard. The context is gone. The exposure is limited and artificial. And, more importantly, you have no real interest in it—if you really cared what the word “ameliorate” meant, you’d probably know it already. No real learning is going to happen in that situation.