In other words, the thing that many people consider to be the single most important SAT prep task—memorizing vocabulary words—is actually the thing that I would rank as the single least important in the grand scheme of the test. I place it dead last in my list of SAT priorities because the payoff is relatively small (or even nonexistent) for the amount of effort that it requires. I can’t possibly over-emphasize how important it is to focus on perfecting the process of correctly answering the Critical Reading questions where you know the words before you start spending any time memorizing definitions that are unlikely to help you on test day anyway.
But What Do We Do About Words We Don’t Know?
When my students hear me say that I don’t recommend memorizing vocabulary as a strategy for the SAT, they’re often quite surprised. Their surprise quickly turns to doubt, and sometimes even indignation. Sometimes they ask, “Well, if I’m not building my vocabulary, what am I supposed to do when I run into SAT words that I don’t know?”
And this is when I have to break it to them that there will almost always be words you don’t know on the Critical Reading part of the SAT . . . no matter how many words you try to memorize beforehand.
Remember what we said earlier:
oThere are tons and tons of words the College Board can use.
oThey seem to use new ones all the time.
oThe lists people study only reflect the words that have appeared on past tests instead of accurately predicting words that will appear on future tests.
For all of these reasons, it’s impossible to avoid that scary feeling of running into unknown words on the SAT.
On test day, you’re going to run into words you don’t know. It’s going to happen, whether you memorize words or not. Count on it.
So we were going to need strategies for dealing with unknown words in Sentence Completion questions no matter what.
Since you’ll need backup strategies for dealing with unknown words anyway, my recommendation is that you just get really, really good at those backup strategies. So we’ll talk about those kinds of strategies in a little bit—but only if you promise me you understand that these strategies are the least important part of taking the SAT. Before you worry about this stuff, you should be worrying about picking up all the Critical Reading questions in which vocabulary is not an issue for you.
(You’ll notice that I repeat this idea of de-prioritizing vocabulary a lot. There’s a reason: I’ve tutored tons and tons of people, and many of them have deliberately ignored my advice about not trying to memorize vocab words for the SAT. They even seem to do well on their practice tests, because most of the words they memorized were taken from the available practice tests. Then they go take the test officially and run into a lot of words they don’t know, and they have a hard time since they haven’t worked on any backup strategies for that situation. Do not be like these people. Take me seriously when I say that memorizing vocabulary should be your last priority, not your first one.)
The Big Secret Of Sentence Completion Questions
The big secret of Sentence Completion questions is essentially identical to the big secret of the Passage-Based Reading questions: correct answer choices will restate ideas from the sentence.
In other words, we are not simply looking for words that make okay-sounding sentences when inserted in the blanks. On many questions, you will find more than one answer choice that makes a decent-sounding sentence. We want the only answer choice that specifically restates an idea from the sentence.
For some questions (often, but not always, the first ones in a set), the way that the correct answer restates a part of the sentence is pretty clear. The grammar of these kinds of sentences is straightforward, and the correct answer choices for these kinds of questions involve fairly normal words.
For other questions, the words in the question may be fairly easy words for most test-takers, but the grammar of the sentence may be so complicated that some test-takers lose track of its meaning and aren’t sure which ideas should be restated in the blanks.
Finally, there are other questions where the words are very challenging, and you might not really have much of an idea what the sentence or the words mean when you read the question for the first time. (As I’ve said many times by now, these types of questions are the ones that make people feel like they should memorize a lot of vocabulary. But that isn’t the best way to handle them. We’ll get to that later.)
We said before that there are basically two kinds of Sentence Completion questions, from the College Board’s standpoint: questions with one blank, and questions with two blanks. But it would also be true to say that, from a test-taker’s standpoint, there’s a more important way to divide up the Sentence Completion questions: there are questions where we know enough of the words to be sure which answer choice restates part of the sentence, and questions where we don’t know enough words to be sure.