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October SAT Scores Are Trickling In, and the First One Is a Big One

Mr. John's Test Prep

Mr. John's Test Prep

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October SAT Scores Are Trickling In, and the First One Is a Big One

Dear MJTP families,

October scores started coming in this morning. I had a small group sitting for this one, so I’m still waiting to hear from most of you, but the first report made my day.

One student raised her score from a 1440 to a 1540. That’s a 100-point jump, and anyone who has prepped at that level knows how hard those points are to earn. At 1440, there aren’t many mistakes left to fix, so nearly every point has to come from the hardest questions on the test. She did her prep on The Gauntlet, and it shows.

RC...super proud of you!

If you took the October SAT and haven’t sent me your scores yet, please email support@mrjohnstestprep.com. Whether it’s good news or bad news, I want to hear it.

The students who are crushing it are using hard questions

The students posting the biggest gains this fall have one thing in common. They aren’t spending their time reviewing what they already know. They’re going straight to the hardest questions on The Gauntlet and working them until those questions don’t feel hard anymore. If you’re already scoring in the 1400s, that’s where your next 50 or 100 points are going to come from.

The SAT Vocab Trends pillar page is updated with October data

I updated the SAT Vocab Trends pillar page yesterday with the October administration. It now covers 28 official SATs from March 2024 through October 2026, with 420 unique words and 42 words that have shown up on three or more tests.

A few things changed this month. Attenuate appeared again in October, its seventh time on the test and its second straight administration after September, which moves it into the top tier. The Elite Three is now the Elite Four: eschew, ubiquitous, idiosyncratic, and attenuate. Incongruous also picked up its fifth appearance, and ambivalent, harbinger, preempt, and exploit each reached three. October also set a new record with 48 reported words, beating September’s 41.

As soon as the October School Day SAT and the PSAT wrap up, I'll be posting those vocabulary sets asap.

The October quizzes are live

I’ve posted four new quizzes built from the words students reported on the October test:

Go back and study last November and December

If you’re testing in November or December, don’t skip last year’s quizzes from those months. A lot of the words from those tests have already repeated, and several are now on the high-frequency list. From November 2025, that includes abridge, enumerate, undermine, underscore, and ambivalent. From December 2025, it includes abridge again, along with belie, conjecture, detrimental, heterogeneous, incongruous, ameliorate, and vindicate.

I’m not predicting that any of these words will show up next month. I’m telling you they’ve already come back once, and that’s the best signal we have.

I’ll share more scores as they come in.

Mr. John

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