Note: If you are really serious about improving your vocabulary, we highly recommend you check out the popular Ultimate Vocabulary Builder

What Makes Good SAT Exam Vocabulary Software?

Before you start looking for something to buy, you should probably learn what makes a good SAT exam software program. The SAT is a big part of any high schooler’s life. It’s a high-stakes test, and can have a massive effect on which colleges you get into. Anyone can get nervous when they take the SAT, but with a good vocabulary you will definitely have an edge on the critical reading and writing sections of the test.

The traditional way to cram for a vocabulary test is with flashcards. Generally you write the word on the side and the definition on the other, and then practice looking at one while trying to remember the other. This is a great way to learn words for a test where you just have to match them up with their definitions. However, for the verbal portion of the SAT, you will need to know a bit more about the target words. The test includes sentence completion and reading comprehension questions. For these types of questions, you actually need to know how and when to use those words.

The people with the biggest and most extensive vocabularies are the people that read frequently. By reading high level material, these people encounter new words in their natural setting. When you read a new word as part of a sentence or paragraph, you learn a bit of the meaning even if you never look it up in a dictionary. If you keep seeing that word as you read, you will eventually learn it well enough to use it yourself. Unfortunately, not everyone has spent tons of time reading by the time they need to take the SAT. You don’t have time to do a lifetime of reading, you need to learn certain words, and you need to learn them soon.

There are a whole bunch of SAT exam vocabulary software programs available. Some of them just give you practice tests. Some of them act as flashcards. Vocaboly and WordFlash are inexpensive programs that are basically computerized flashcard sets that already know the words you need for the SAT. Other programs, like Ultimate Vocabulary and Power Vocabulary Builder are designed to help you learn words like you would when you read. These types of programs don’t just give you definitions, they show you dozens of sentences that use those words. Studying with software like Ultimate Vocabulary is like catching up on a lifetime of reading in just a few minutes a day. Software can even keep track of which words you already know.