Now that the SAT no longer includes analogy questions, do students still need to study vocabulary in preparation for the SAT?
Yes. The sentence completion questions still explicitly test particular dictionary definitions. Furthermore, the Critical Reading sections increasingly test vocabulary in context. There are certainly many words in the English language: comprehensive dictionaries contain more than 600,000 word forms. But the SAT draws from an important subset representing approximately one percent of that total. This important subset—words that parents would want their children to know—serves as the currency of almost every branch of higher education. If students have not yet learned these words, the SAT provides the ideal impetus for doing so. Every student can and should learn the cornerstones of English vocabulary represented by this one percent.
