How are SAT curves made ?

Test Preparation
1

<p>How are SAT curves made ?</p>

<p>Are the curves made after people take the SAT or ETS sets them before the test day ? Does ETS have a special formula for the curves ?</p>

2

<p>People have said that the ETS determines the curve before the test is administered. How they do that, I am not sure of. Do they have test groups? Or maybe they already know if all the questions are recycled.</p>

3

<p>they prolly prescale the test based on experimental sections</p>

4

<p>i heard they scale it in advance based on previous administrations of the same test (they are all recycled, pretty much.)</p>

5

<p>"Next, the raw score is converted to the College Board 200-to-800 scaled score by a statistical process called equating. Equating adjusts for slight differences in difficulty between test editions, and ensures that a student's score of, say, 450 on one edition of a test reflects the same ability as a score of 450 on another edition of the test and that a student's score does not depend on how well others did on the same edition of the test." - [url=<a href="http://www.collegeboard.com/prof/counselors/tests/sat/scores/faq_scoring.html#quest01%5DCollegeboard%5B/url"&gt;http://www.collegeboard.com/prof/counselors/tests/sat/scores/faq_scoring.html#quest01]Collegeboard[/url&lt;/a&gt;]&lt;/p>

<p>Every question on the SAT has been previewed on the SAT before that date. That's what the experimental sections are for. Basically, CollegeBoard, after making and refining their questions, put them in the experimental section and see how hard it is and if it, simply, a good question that provides some information about the student's abilities and that it does not have a high bias in favor of a certain group of test takers. Once they have all the information about the questions, they assemble a test that should be similar in difficulty to all the other SATs that have been given. Also, recently, ETS has been recycling old test questions, which works in essentially the same way as experimental sections.</p>

<p>In short, the "curve" is PRE-determined and the quality of the test takers on the day you take it has absolutely no relevance to what the "curve" is. They already know how hard every question is, so determining it as such would be unnecessary. </p>

<p>I'm sure that they have a formula, but they have not released it. The formula, though, just ensures that a score of, say, 1500, reflects the same level of ability as all other 1500s do.
Hope that helped</p>

6

<p>the formula is here:</p>

<p>x bar = {[(xi - yi)^p(b) - (xa + ya)^p(a)] * standard deviation * Z (score)}/(population variance) * (n - 1)/500 * 800t</p>

<p>in which n is your raw score and t (either 78 for verbal and 60 for math) is the maximum raw score you can have</p>

<p>other variables are determined from the population statistic from the experimental section</p>

7

<p>^^^where did you get that? what is a and t and b?</p>

8

<p>pudding I dont think thats right because CB, or at least everyone says, does not take into consideration people's scores on it.</p>