I agree with The College Board and disagree with this article's author.

Learning obscure SAT words that aren't used either in academic writing or daily parlance is a waste of everyone's time and doesn't prove someone is better suited for college. It is just an arbitrary memorisation game.

If someone runs across a new word at the college level they can do what anyone does at any level and look it up. No big deal. Calling people who don't know the 1% most obscure words in the English dictionary "pretend readers" is just trolling for controversy.