Vocabulary study is very important for the critical reading section of the SAT. There are 19 sentence completion questions requiring students to know word meanings. Additionally, there are a number of questions on the reading passages that also require word knowledge. The problem, of course, is that there are many words that that need to be studied for a student to significantly affect his or her score. Some students study vocabulary in their English classes, others do not. Especially for those students who do not study vocabulary in school, a long term program of study is highly recommended. There are many materials for SAT vocabulary training available. One of the books that I like is called Vocabulary Cartoons (make sure it says SAT on the book cover), which gives students ways to remember the meanings. If the student has a very strong memory they may not need this tool and may get a more traditional book like “Hot Words for the SAT.” It’s best to just go on Amazon, put in SAT vocabulary training andd read through the materials available to see which is most attractive for the student. The best approach is to learn a certain number of words (20? 30?) each week. A few schools go over latin roots and prefixes and this is very helpful. I was very impressed with my students fro Vista Del Lago HS in Folsom, CA who got extensive training in Latin roots each year in HS and used it well to discover word meaning for difficult words.