<p>
[quote]
scoring a 2400 requires you get all questions right (or close). Guessing all questions right has a probability of (1/5)^ 177, whereas guessing all wrong has a probability of (4/5)^177.</p>
<p>2400 is more impressive
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Sure, if you're talking about straight up guessing every single problem...which is not what we were talking about.</p>
<p>i wonder out of the 294 people, assuming all applied to, say Harvard or MIT, what % got in. I remember my math teacher saying that a surprisingly low % of USAMO takers who applied to MIT got in.</p>
<p>Inasmuch as scoring high on standardized tests tends to correlate with such independent selection factors as taking challenging high school courses and being involved in academic extracurriculars, high-scorers are usually highly sought-after students. See </p>
<p>for discussion of some worst-case scenarios, but in general students who score a 2400 can get into some pretty decent college, although perhaps not their favorite college, and their base rate of acceptance at the most selective colleges is generally higher than the overall rate of acceptance at those same colleges.</p>
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[quote]
"If one gets an 80 on the MC part of Writing, one can get as low as a 9 on the essay and still get an 800."</p>
<p>Depends on the test - I had an 80 and 9 and got a 780. That still seems pretty generous though.
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</p>
<p>I got the same exact raw score you did (80 and 9) and got an 800. Weird stuff, huh?</p>
<p>I've always found the idea of being part of a statistic sort of interesting, but being part of such a small number is sort of creepy. It's like, OMG there are only 200 other names that are part of that list! Does anyone else get that feeling?</p>
<p>Yes, the curves do vary a little from one test administration to another. </p>
<p>I have no problem with requiring an impromptu essay on the SAT or ACT -- not only because Mom and Dad can't edit it, but it's also a practical application of the grammar and usage rules. One might be able to test prep the rules, but applying them to one's own writing can be an entirely different story.</p>
<p>I don't even remember which schools on S's list looked at the SAT Writing score. His Writing score was consistent with his application essays and his AP Eng Lang score, so we just didn't worry about it (and hoped it would indeed demonstrate that his AP English teacher was indeed a tough one!).</p>
<p>Is there a link for ACT scores too? Just wondering about similar stats for ACT</p>
<p>How do they do it??? They must have been born with natural talent :P</p>
<p>ACT scores:ACT</a> National and State Scores for 2008: National Profile Report</p>
<p>How do they do it??? They must have been born with natural talent :P</p>
<p>The</a> SAT's Growing Gaps :: Inside Higher Ed :: Higher Education's Source for News, Views and Jobs
Coming from the higher economic end of the spectrum doesn't hurt either:
"The SAT’s Growing Gaps - In recent years, the College Board’s annual reports have featured data showing an increasing share of the SAT test-taking population in the $100,000+ level of family income. (By contrast, the most recent federal data on household income reports a median for the United States of just over $50,000.) In past years, the $100,000+ category was the highest category, and it grew from 21 to 26 percent from 2005 through 2007. This year, the College Board broke up the category into five, while merging some of the lower income categories.
But comparing last year’s income levels to this year’s reveals that the $100,000+ cohorts combined went to 30 percent from 26 percent last year. Meanwhile, the percentage of test takers reporting family incomes of up to $20,000 fell to 10 percent from 12 percent."</p>
<p>Sure not all the 2400s may come from the higher income families but I'd be willing to bet a large proportion do. Which makes me wonder just how worthwhile the perfect score really is.</p>
<p>Another muff in reporting by Inside Higher Education. ALL that the reported facts show is that incomes are rising in the United States, which they continue to do in nominal terms. </p>
<p>It would be helpful for College Board to publish bivariate plots ("scatter plots") of SAT scores plotted against student self-reported family income, because then everyone in the world could see that all income ranges include a wide score range. ONCE, and only once, College Board also published data that could be shown relating self-reported income levels to mean scores for each student self-reported ethnic group separately (so that a reader could see typical score levels at various levels of income patterns for each broad ethnic group). The College Board has not done that for years now, although it surely must still gather enough data to do that.</p>
<p>^^ Are you saying then that only tests that put the lowest income kids at the top of the score distribution are useful? </p>
<p>The class warfare rhetoric on here gets absolutely preposterous sometimes.</p>
<p>Yes, parents who are able to foot the bill for expensive test prep courses/coaching are likely able to help their kids raise their scores, but not to a perfect single-sitting SAT or ACT. The CC parents who report their kids got a 2400/36 and each of the handful of perfect scorers I know IRL have all aced the test on their first sitting with prior "prep" consisting of a few hours spent with a test prep book, familiarizing themselves with the format of the test and maybe taking one or two practice tests. Costly coaching can help kids improve their scores. It can't help them achieve perfect scores right out of the box, if at all, IMO.</p>
<p>See also </p>
<p>It's not at all clear how many students who are scoring 2400 these days have never, ever taken an SAT test before. Talent Search testing is becoming more and more pervasive.</p>
<p>damn it i got a 2380 in my first sitting. i got the 780 on the math section, and i only got one problem wrong. if i got that problem right, i would have had a 2400</p>
<p>For male IQ, one standard deviation is 14.7 points. For females it is 14.2 points. In other words, males have a fatter bell curve, with more males at the low end and at the high end; females have a thinner bell curve with more females clustering at median IQ ranges.</p>
<p>And correlations between income and SAT scores don't necessarily indicate an unfair advantage. Smart parents usually have high incomes. Smart parents usually have smart children. As a result, smart parents with high incomes have smart children who score well on SATs. The correlation is merely a coincidence of factors.</p>
<p>However, teens from rich families usually have more time to study, more supportive parents, and access to high cost prep programs. It's hard to think how this would not provide an advantage but it is hard to quantify just how much of an advantage.</p>
<p>
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For male IQ, one standard deviation is 14.7 points. For females it is 14.2 points.
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</p>
<p>Source for this statement? Which brand of IQ test are you talking about? What age of test-taker are you talking about? </p>
<p>Books</a> on IQ Tests and Human Intelligence (Learn in Freedom)</p>
<p>I lost the source to support that statement, but it was based on a study done in Ireland (because of racial homogeneity) with pre-pubescent children (in order to avoid education related bias). The study concluded that the difference between average male and female IQ were sufficiently small to be dismissed as statistical error but there were large differences in standard deviation.</p>
<p>It's not the source, but here is an abstract that says roughly the same thing in regard to standard deviation in IQ without concrete numbers.
[quote]
An analysis of mental test scores from six studies that used national probability samples provided evidence that although average sex differences have been generally small and stable over time, the test scores of males consistently have larger variance.
[/quote]
<p>And another, again not the source.
[quote]
The paper that supports the conventional wisdom is Jensen, A. R., & Reynolds, C. R. (1983). It finds that females have a 101.41 mean IQ with a 13.55 standard deviation versus males that have a 103.08 mean IQ with a 14.54 standard deviation.
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<p>FIVE perfect scores came from my high school alone.</p>
<p>wow i feel stupid</p>