The submissions are lists of words in a particular order. Here is how a given list is scored against the text for that category:
The list of words you submit is read in order. Each word is considered a step in the vocab learning process. After each step, a calculation is made of what proportion of verses in the category's text can be read given the knowledge of the current word and all before it in your list. This proportion is the score for that step. The final score is the sum of all the individual step scores.
If you imagine a graph with the steps as the x-axis and the number of verses known at each step on the y-axis then the score is proportional to the area under the curve.
A Python script for calculating the score can be found at http://jtauber.com/2005/programming_competition/scorer.py. This is the same program I will use to do the scoring.
The original post was in the category: programming_competition but I'm still in the process of migrating categories over.