With the month of November being just around the corner, the application deadlines for many universities, including the popular UCs, are within just a month’s reach. As seniors are working diligently to complete their applications to the colleges of their preference, they are most likely submitting their SAT scores that they worked so hard for. Many underclassmen are also preparing to take the daunting test for the very first time soon.

The SAT does not command a great deal of fanfare though, as students resent the fact that their futures rely so heavily on their scores from this single test. It is a common opinion among students that GPA and difficulty in coursework should be enough to evaluate students’ academic abilities, as they show the accomplishments of an entire high school career — not just those of a single test-taking day.

Although many students find the SAT to be a rather invaluable tool in estimating their abilities, I have to disagree on most points. In my opinion, the test is formatted well to test skills that students have developed over the course of high school, including the abilities to comprehend and analyze literature, and to use reasoning to solve complex arithmetic problems. I do, however, disagree with the test’s expectation of students to have memorized a list full of thousands of rather infrequently-used words (if they wish to score well, that is). Learning maybe 100 words is reasonable; however, 3,500…not so much.

Since the SAT is a reasoning test, it doesn’t seem that the memorization of words is really necessary. The math portion of the test does not require test-takers to memorize math formulas, so I do not see why they are required to memorize words that could be easily looked up in a dictionary. In addition, the list of words that test-takers are expected to know is so extensive that many find themselves overwhelmed and discouraged from learning any of the words at all (myself included).

I understand that the purpose of this part of the test is to determine if a student is prepared for college-level vocabulary, and yes, there are some (more commonly-used) words that test-takers should be familiar with. However, the SAT utilizes some words that are so obscure, that it’s impractical to have to memorize them. I predict that words like “boon” or “mawkish” will be seen so infrequently in my college studies that I would rather take up a few seconds looking them up in the future, than memorizing them along with a couple thousand other words all at once. Additionally, I’ll be more likely to understand the meaning of the word when I look it up when I actually come across it in context, rather than in a generic example in my SAT prep book.

Thankfully, my last SAT is behind me, and any words that I did manage to memorize are slowly fading out of my brain, as I haven’t used them since. However, the word “superfluous” is one I am unable to erase from my mind as I think back on all the hours spent trying to memorize the long list of words. At least I learned one!