<p>sbjdorlo, the PSAT tends to sharply underpredict scores of students near the top of the curve. You may be able to find the raw score to scaled score conversion for some years of the PSAT online. Most years, missing 1 question on the math will take a student down to 76, whereas missing one question on the SAT math, although rarely yielding an 800, will typically give a 780 or so.</p>
<p>I am not saying that students’ scores cannot go up to the 2400 category, from 2250-ish.</p>
<p>But I am saying that a student with a 2400 is unlikely to drop to a 2250 on a re-test (of course, a student with a 2400 essentially never retests, so the data are hard to come by). This is based on an analysis of the number of questions missed, plus the improbability of having a drop in all three sections.</p>
<p>I don’t think that most of the students I know who scored 800 in any section are likely to attribute it to “luck,” except out of politeness.</p>
<p>If a student who has a 2250 thinks that is really equivalent to a 2400, then the student does have an opportunity to prove that it is.</p>
<p>There are a few categories of work where the kind of attention to detail that will yield an 800 on the SAT math section actually is important, and the difference between 800 and 780/790 likely matters.</p>
<p>Lockheed’s F22 Raptor had multiple computer system crashes which could not be handled by rebooting, during a flight from Hawaii to Okinawa. It seems that the system designers forgot the International Date Line.</p>
<p>As another example, I believe that the U.S. has had the only successful Mars landings so far. We had a failed attempt when the people transferring numerical results from one group to another did not specify whether the numbers were in SI units or English units.</p>
<p>This sort of issue of inattention probably wouldn’t affect a college student much, but it potentially makes a lot of difference in a subsequent career.</p>
<p>That’s a pretty tenuous connection. I think any of the aerospace engineers I know would strongly disagree that a 10-point difference in SAT I math scores is predictive of their ability to design aircraft. </p>
<p>If Lockheed or NASA thought that a high school SAT score provided any information on the quality of an engineer, they would already be asking for that information on the application. If I am not mistaken, applications to top investment banks do ask for SAT scores. (And I’d argue that the financial crisis was worse a disaster than any Mars landing.)</p>
<p>There are a lot of ways to assess the quality of an engineer once the student has a few years of college under his/her belt, so there is no need to refer back to the SAT M. One can see whether the student is careful–and also imaginative and firm in understanding of engineering principles.</p>
<p>But I stand by my original comment: I think the SAT M is comparatively easy. Good students who don’t score 800 most likely have made either careless or “stupid” errors that they would quickly realize upon review. The ability to avoid those errors from the get-go is a useful ability to have. </p>
<p>Sandra Tsing Loh commented that she got through Caltech on partial credit and the realization that the answer to any question concerning electron spin was extremely likely to be 1/2.</p>
<p>You are in a different field, molliebatmit, so you don’t see the same things that I see–i.e., students who are quite capable but cannot complete any lengthy problem without some errors cropping in (hence the invention of partial credit). I once had a math prof who simply marked questions right or wrong to the great annoyance of many of the students.</p>
<p>The difficulty comes when one is publishing a paper that contains the end result of a long sequence of calculations. The published result is either right or wrong. The concept of “partial credit” does not apply any more.</p>
<p>I don’t see the financial crisis as an issue of the ability to work the numbers–something else entirely.</p>
<p>The ill-fated Mars mission was pretty expensive, even if not on the scale of the financial crisis.</p>
<p>I don’t think you’re applying the right mindset if you’re still talking about NASA and engineers, or if you mean to claim examples of them to your point. Errors do slip through the cracks, believe me, but to suggest that having a better SAT score will help mitigate that is ludicrous. It seems you’re in quite a different field as well.</p>
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<p>You also seem to have contradicted yourself, please explain. I won’t try to wrongly infer what this could imply.</p>
<p>I agree with your original comment, QM. For those considering math as a major (or physics and other related fields), getting an 800 on SAT math (and SAT II math, as well) seems like it should be pretty easily attainable for mathy kids who’ve studied through pre-calc. (And I speak as a parent with three children, two of whom will most assuredly never see an 800 on the SAT math)</p>
<p>Attentiveness is a quality of mind that can be developed. For many reasons, a student might not develop it before college. Having examples of attentive thinkers among one’s teachers is quite helpful in developing the quality.</p>
<p>Therefore, a student who is majoring in an engineering field could demonstrate the development of that quality during college, by college work. This means that the student’s abilities have changed. It does not mean that there was no difference between 800 M and 700 M.</p>
<p>In one case I know of in the last 25 years, the “correct” answer to a question on the SAT M involving locus was actually wrong. This was only discoverable because the Question & Answer service applied to that test date. </p>
<p>From what I see on the SAT prep forum, the issues that students have with SAT M questions of the harder variety tend to boil down to things such as:
Not considering all of the possibilities on a question involving locus
Overlooking the possibility of 0 as an interior digit in a 4-digit number
Misapplying the rule for products of probabilities, when the events are not independent</p>
<p>All of these can be handled correctly by a student who has developed alertness. I will happily grant that different school systems help a student to develop this to different extents. So I am <em>not</em> saying that people with SAT M scores below 800 should not consider engineering fields (ditto for physical science and math). But I think it would be very important for them to recognize that there is a quality of attentiveness that they need to work on.</p>
<p>Then, of course, you have the offhand errors which as QMP’s favorite math “fact,”
4 x 7 = 21. (Yes, I know, that error should be obvious!)</p>
<p>My comment about papers applied to publications in the physical sciences, where the final result rests on a long chain of calculations, and there is not a canned program to employ. So that was not really about NASA or engineering.</p>
<p>However, errors in most of these papers are not fatal in the way that an engineering error could be fatal. So perhaps attentiveness (or alertness, or mindfulness–whatever you want to call it) is actually more important for engineers.</p>
<p>Incidentally, I am in serious awe of the NASA engineers who figured out how the Apollo 13 astronauts could orient themselves for re-entry. A hard calculation with no room for error.</p>
<p>And a related comment: An attentive person might have asked, “Why do the CO2 scrubbers in the LEM have a different shape from the ones in the Command Capsule?”</p>
<p>I don’t think this should just be written off as an example of poor communication between the LEM team and the Command Capsule team–I think it is a question of attentiveness. This sort of thing still crops up all the time, from what I hear.</p>
<p>One additional thought that I will contribute: I think that a student who has a 700 M and realizes that there is something different in the way that students who score 800 approach the problems is more likely to develop the quality of attentiveness than a student who wants to write off the difference between 700 and 800 as irrelevant.</p>
<p>Personally, I’m not trying to argue that a 700 on the SAT in math is the same as an 800. I’m just trying to urge caution when it comes to inexorably tying technical capability, and career outcomes in science and engineering, to small fluctuations in that score.</p>
<p>Well, I am practically coming around to the holistic point of view, but with some qualifications. I can imagine a student whose pre-college education was insufficient for them to reliably get the last 4 or 5 questions on the SAT M, but who has the intellectual orientation to be eager and willing to put in the work to catch up. I am not saying that a student’s career future should be frozen in stone at age 17 or 18–that would be ridiculous.</p>
<p>However, I have found it extremely fruitful when I encounter someone whose approach to problem-solving is clearly more efficient, stronger, more elegant . . . to try to figure out what they are doing that is different from what I am doing. I wouldn’t get as much traction from the “I’m just as good as they are” point of view. So I would hope that the students with lower scores would look around and see how the students with 800 M scores think about things. Then subsequently, they can go on to learn problem solving approaches at a higher level, in other classes and from other students, at a much higher level than SAT M.</p>
<p>Being dismissive about the difference does not seem to be a profitable orientation to me.</p>
<p>Also, I don’t consider 100 points to be a “small fluctuation” either, if that is what you mean in post#153, molliebatmit. The last I looked, the College Board claimed that a difference of 60 points in the score on a section was meaningful, in the sense that with repeated testing, the student who scored higher was very likely to score higher again, each additional time that both took the test (within a restricted time frame–clearly this does not apply to 7th grade testers).</p>
<p>But how do you distinguish students who have the “intellectual orientation to be eager and willing to put in the work to catch up” from those who either lack the ability or motivation to catch up? I know admission officers claim they can but they’ve never presented any evidence for this.</p>
<p>I think one of the most compelling reasons for valuing difficult classes in admissions is that they are a better test of abilities and motivation than easier classes.</p>
<p>Yes, that’s the real trick, isn’t it, UMTYMP student? That is, to figure out who has the ability and motivation to learn what he/she doesn’t know, and who is going to write it off as essentially unimportant. Now, obviously, no one person can learn everything! On the other hand, there are some approaches to learning that permit one to accurately cut broad swaths through scientific material, and learn a lot in a short time, relative to less efficient methods. </p>
<p>I am planning to give more thought to helping students adopt the more powerful approaches to learning–can’t say I quite know how to do that yet.</p>
<p>I’ll add my anecdote: October of Junior year - 80 PSAT M, December - 680, May - 790. I don’t know what went wrong in December, but these variances can definitely occur.</p>
<p>Trying to keep the example as general as possible:</p>
<p>This is just how the engineering process works: design, partition, integrate. Add in the “groundbreaking never been done before” part and small errors will get through. NASA has entire teams dedicated just to exploring failure modes and potential factors. The fact that problems continue to happen is actually evidence that “attentiveness” in the ideal sense is unobtainable, because engineering doesn’t work that way. It has to be accepted, for any technology, that not everything can be foreseen. And, you only hear about what was not caught, which, in the context of a large system, may have been only one of a thousand serious problems that was not averted.</p>
<p>Real “attentiveness”, from what I have experienced, doesn’t come it fantastically fixing everything before it becomes a problem. That’s not realistic. It’s about solving the problems when they manifest themselves and being accountable for the ones you don’t catch. A guy I know named Gene Kranz would call it being “tough and competent”.</p>
<p>Perhaps in a parallel to what freeman94 has said: In my field, there is a general claim that there are no debugged programs [these are really large, million-line programs with many options], just a set of debugged routes through the programs.</p>
<p>unicameral2013, was the Q&A service available for the December test? With that large a difference between the PSAT and the SAT it probably would have made sense to order it, if so. Did you have a lot going on in December? I think that lack of sleep can have a significant impact on scores. In our local high school, the PSAT scores of the top students sometimes go down between sophomore and junior years, a phenomenon that I attribute 100% to lack of sleep.</p>
<p>Also, freeman94, if you know Gene Kranz, then you know a lot more about NASA than I do. But then, what about that failed Mars mission, where the numbers passed to a team down the line were not in the units they expected, and no one checked? </p>
<p>This doesn’t seem to me to be a case of fanatically fixing possible problems before they occur. This seems to me to be the attention to <em>units</em> that is emphasized to most students beginning in middle school, even if they never take any science or math after high school. Simple alertness or checking one’s assumptions should have caught that problem before it got started.</p>
<p>I once heard a faculty member speaking at a conference deliver a scathing commentary on the performance of a post-doc, who insisted on carrying out calculations in terms of dimensionless quantities, but who unfortunately had picked a set of parameters that were very far from the region of physical interest. I didn’t think this situation reflected well on either of them, but it’s the post-doc whose career was most adversely affected.</p>