<p>Oh, silverturtle, you must concede a point to vaselopita for #118.
I would say that there are three primary strands which lead to high scores: prep, knowledge and intelligence. There is a fourth factor which is hard to tease out - the best name I can give that is psychological affects.
Prep: flash cards, tutor work, practice tests,what-have-you. This is effort expended in attempting to better your score, but not , sadly, doing anything else worth while. Students vary hugely in terms of how much prep they can take on and how much prep they choose to take on.
Knowledge: The ‘natural’ knowledge that the SATs were intended, in part, to measure. Vocabulary gaining from reading, not swotting. Math skills gained from math study, etc.
Intelligence: Clearly intelligence plays a role. You can’t do well in the math section of the SATs if you can’t understand algebra.
The fourth factor matters too and is a wild card. Some students really panic at the sight of the bubbles and pencils. There is some reason to believe that the SATs may be race biased as well.
To me, this adds up to the SAT as a very blunt instrument. That’s okay, if you assume that most adcoms know their business. But, the extreme effort in prep by many students (quite a few of which can be found here) is a waste.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Why would I reward a post whose only point was to, incidentally inaccurately, insinuate a personal insult of no relevance?</p>
<p>Re: Post 118 and 122.</p>
<p>Sorry to have apparently touched a sore spot, silverturtle. This is one of the problems inherent in forums - subtle moods are nearly impossible. By “concede a point” , I did not intend to suggest any more than the least degree of merit in post 118. In fact, I was merely amused by vaselopita’s observation. You do, indeed, spend a great deal of time here on the forums.
To flog the horse a bit - I was speaking of ‘a point’ as a sports metaphor, not as a debate concession. “Conceding a point” , in this context, merely meaning ‘unimportant as this comment/observation may be, it is accurate’.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Can’t argue with that.</p>
<p>There you go…you just conceded a point. :-)</p>
<p>Intelligence crtainly won’t hurt you on these tets, though.</p>
<p>samd1993 - I disagree.</p>
<p>In the case of outliers (like myself, who went from a 1710 to an 2180), the reason these far and few between have such dramatic jumps in score over 1-to-2 year periods is because they were completely unfamiliar with the test, and by taking practice tests, were able to get a better feel for it. Not to sound arrogant, but kids who make huge jumps in their composite in under a 2-year-period were intelligent to begin with but either didn’t figure out the test well or needed another year of english, math, and reading to cover the entirety of the subject matter.</p>
<p>I have a friend who did one-on-one tutoring with the Princeton Review for six months before retaking. His score went from a 1710 to a 1740 - hardly a large jump.</p>
<p>Huge jumps in scores do happen - but not often, and when they do, the talent and ability was always present, but either hadn’t emerged yet or hadn’t reached its full capcity. That’s my explanation of it.</p>
<p>If this matters at all - I score better than nearly all of my classmates when I don’t put work in (so its not a “oh you’re just a hard worker” thing), and yet my SAT is probably lower than most of them (1610 without study).</p>
<p>The SAT measures a certain kind of “applied” intelligence, imho. Some people can apply their intelligence better in certain ways</p>
<p>@nemom I think post 118 was actually directed towards tb0mb93</p>
<p>It was directed to silverturtle who seems to spend too much time on this forum</p>
<p>TheYankinYork:</p>
<p>I am very strongly F (INFP), and I got 800 crit reading. I self-study graduate philosophy though, so that probably helped :P</p>