How Many Words Should I Learn for The GRE or SAT?
I tell my students to learn at least 300 new words, but that is really the bare minimum. Why? It takes at least that many before you have a snowball’s chance in H-E-double-hockey-sticks of seeing enough of them on the test to actually nudge up your score.
Consider, if the GRE or SAT has 4,500 possible vocabulary words to choose from (a rough guesstimate), and you see, say, 150 on any given verbal section, what are the chances that one of the 300 new words you studied will be among them?
Answer: 300 out of 4,500 translates to a 1in 15 chance that any given vocabulary word on the GRE or SAT will be one you studied. Schmoes who play those kinds of odds end up with names like Frankie Four Fingers and Cement-Loafers Larry. You’re just begging for large men with bruised knuckles, crooked noses, and debatable fashion-sense to leave horse heads under your covers, figuratively speaking.
150 words per verbal section multiplied by that 1 in 15 chance means an average of 10 of your words will possibly show up … but again, that’s a random chance. Sometimes you may see none of the words you studied; sometimes you may see 20.
So learn as many words as you possibly can. Most of my international students learn more like 1000 new words. That means, on average, they’ll see 33 words they studied. They’re (wisely) playing the odds.
So get to work on that GRE or SAT vocabulary before Bullet-Tooth Tony comes knockin’, threatening to feed you to the pigs.
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agree… If you have a great confidence in the math part, 300 vocab is the least you need to memorize. So, if you’re bad in Math too, you need to jack up the vocab memorization
I’ve got a pretty good score in memorizing 300 words, but I had a great confidence of my math knowledge… Thanks Cody for helping me study!
Wow, that didn’t make any sense. Each possible GRE word does not have even odds of appearing on the test. There are words that appear more frequently than others on the GRE so memorizing vocab that appears more frequently would be a good way to increase your verbal score. This guy needs a math lesson.
I’ve mentioned the high frequency word lists in several other posts, and I would definitely recommend starting with those to give yourself the best possible odds, but those high frequency lists are based on analyses of past tests.
According to Barron’s, their SAT High-Frequency word list consists of words that have appeared, “from eighty to forty times on SATs published in the past two decades.” Eighty times in the past TWENTY YEARS for the highest of the high frequency words.
Definitely start with the high-frequency lists compiled by the various test prep companies. Your best chance, however, is still in learning large quantities of words.