ROI isn’t a very useful metric, imo, since most high school students spend a lot of time watching TV and playing video games, or at least can spare a few hundred hours of vacation time without any great loss. Of course, if your time is very scarce and valuable, or if your college admission ambitions are relatively modest, then the gains from any study activity might not be worth the time to you, but in a vacuum, ROI makes little sense.
I know that for students I’ve worked with (2-3 hundred a year since '02, some with low English fluency but many with native fluency, some with lots of experience with rote memorization, some with little to none, but all of whom want to maximize their college admissions options), nothing else provides as easy improvement as does studying good vocab lists. Students in the 300s or 400s (typically very low fluency) can reliably (as in: invariably) get into the 600s in CR; students in the 500s can get into the 700s; and students in the 600s can compete for a perfect 800.
I also know that, for instance, if I had a 640 in CR and still missed some sentcoms and vocab-related passage questions, I’d want to learn the vocab and make those mistakes go away so I’d never miss any questions because of vocab ever again, and since I’ve been doing this for a living for a long time, I know exactly how attainable that goal is. In some ways, vocab in CR is like numbers in math–can you imagine trying to solve a math test without knowing all the numbers? Well when you try to read passages and solve CR questions without knowing the words (or the vast majority of them), you’re doing something similar–you have to guess what words mean, what sentences mean, and, often, what answers mean. Passages are made of words, after all.
When I get a class of Exeter or St. Paul’s students who are all already in the 700s, I almost invariably see that they still miss a sentcom or three, which indicates that at least another two or three of their errors are vocab-related as well. When they learn the vocab, their score range is 780-800. When I get a kid with a 340, I know that kid has no hope of understanding the passages until she learns a couple thousand words, and when she does, she’s invariably in the 600s.
I respect @xiggi’s point of view a lot and he’s done a great deal to help a lot of people on this forum. I also understand his reasoning and get why it’s appealing. But my data and experience say otherwise.
Let’s look at some “types” of students (highly reductive, I know, but just for simplicity’s sake–this comment is looong already!):
- Low fluency international
- Mediocre reader
- Strong reader
Type 1 obviously needs to learn words. As my Spanish teacher in high school told me, “vocabulario es necesario para hablar una idioma.” This type of student needs everything, of course, but vocab is an easy and reliable starting point, and with limited time, it can do wonders. I don’t get many students like this, but I’ve seen dozens of students go from the 300s to the 600s with virtually only vocab, after all, and that score jump is life-changing.
Type 2: it turns out that it’s way easier (and faster) to learn thousands of words than it is to read the hundreds of books necessary to become a very strong reader. Of course there are methods and techniques to help this student become a better SAT CR reader as well, but without mastering vocab, her ceiling is unlikely to ever reach 750, which, I believe, should be every student’s goal (except those whose fluency issues make it impossible in the time frame of two years of high school).
Type 3 students can sometimes (like @normanxi !) get 750-800 on the virtue of their excellent reading skills and existing, organically-developed vocab. If they can, they should do so and then call it a day. But they usually find that some tests have words they know and others have words they don’t know, and there’s always the risk that they’ll underachieve on the exam unless they’re fully confident in their vocabulary. I really hate it when I see a kid miss her 750+ because of a few vocab questions–vocab is so easily learned, so un-reliant on “intelligence” or “skill” that anyone can learn it, anyone can master it, and “smart” kids shouldn’t take it for granted if they want to make sure they’ll hit their mark.
Every student is different, and most students don’t have the discipline or inclination to spend a few hundred hours learning 200+ vocab words during their summer vacation, but for students who want to ensure that they get their best possible score–students of all skill levels!–I know that vocab is the easiest path. I’m not at all arguing that vocab is all people need; students must solve many practice tests and review what they’ve solved carefully, learning how the test works and the patterns of SAT passages. Like every experienced instructor, I’ve developed my own methods for doing so. But those methods vary depending on students’ needs; vocabulary does not. It’s a constant.