The September 2026 SAT Vocab Survey + Quiz - US Version 2

With the help of reports from students and Reddit's r/SAT, I've compiled the most common and challenging vocabulary from the September 2026 SAT — pulling from both the US and International administrations. I've put these into a quiz format so students and parents can challenge themselves. Good luck!

SAT Vocabulary September 2026 US - Round 2 - Warm-up Reading Passage

Instructions: Read this passage carefully before taking your quiz. All 13 vocabulary words from September 2026 US SAT Round 2 appear in context. Pay attention to how each word is used naturally in the story.

The Committee Room

Nadia Reyes had spent eleven months on a single question: did the state's school breakfast program actually improve attendance? Individual district reports disagreed wildly, so she had pooled all forty-two of them into a meta-analysis, weighting each by its sample size and quality. The pooled result was clear. Attendance rose. Now she had to explain it to the Joint Fiscal Committee, which was deciding whether to rescind the program's funding for the coming year.

The hearing room was warm and half-empty, and the committee looked lethargic, sunk in the third hour of budget testimony. Nadia decided she had about four minutes before their attention would elude her entirely.

She began with the one district whose numbers were anomalous: attendance had dropped after the program began. Every opponent of the program cited it. Nadia showed that the district had also closed two schools that year, forcing hour-long bus rides on a third of its students. Remove that confounder and the district looked like every other one.

A senator interrupted. The program's paperwork, he said, was onerous—principals in his district spent hours a week on reimbursement forms. Nadia agreed. The forms were byzantine, requiring the same enrollment figure on four separate pages, each in a different format. But that was a reason to fix the forms, not to kill the program.

The chair asked what she made of the earlier evaluation, the one from 2019 that had found no effect. Nadia had expected this. That study, she said, had operated under a paradigm in which attendance was measured only on the day a meal was served. Her analysis counted the full week. The old approach did not preclude finding an effect; it just made one nearly impossible to detect.

Something in the answer seemed to perturb the senator who had complained about paperwork. He shifted in his chair and asked whether she was calling the earlier evaluators careless. No, she said. They had been rigorous by the standards of the time. The standards had moved.

When the vote came, the committee kept the funding by a single vote and ordered the department to simplify the forms within ninety days. Afterward, the chair told Nadia her testimony had come to epitomize what the committee wanted from analysts: a direct answer, a clear accounting of the weak points, and no theater.

Nadia's only regret was that she had not brought the district-by-district charts. Two members had asked for them. She sent them that night.

Vocabulary words practiced: meta-analysis, fiscal, rescind, lethargic, elude, anomalous, onerous, byzantine, paradigm, preclude, perturb, epitomize, regret