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<p>I missed two on math, and got a 760. Lucky me.</p>
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If it is not the purpose then why does Collegeboard bother to provide a score beyond the 700 threshold at all, and why does it do this when it knows full well that qualification for scholarship programs directly depend on the specific score for each section of the SAT?</p>
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<p>Gotta draw a line somewhere. If they used 700, some would be complain about that number. Or, 900. Or 1,000. (It is what it is.)</p>
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<p>CollegeBoard is a nonprofit whose members and Board of Directors are colleges, who use score for admissions. If the member colleges wanted a test that went to 1,000 (or whatever top-end score), CB would write. The member colleges do not want such a test.</p>
<p>CB cannot be responsible for scholarship programs who use the test to dole out money. Again, their membership (kinda like owners in the nonprofit world) are the colleges themselves. CB does what THEY want.</p>
<p>It’s not that the test has to go to 1,000. I don’t think it would be too difficult to create a test on a 60 point scale (which is what the SAT is) that could differentiate between people in all parts of the spectrum. I understand that this isn’t what the colleges want. It’s just somewhat strange how little a role academic qualification seems to play.</p>
<p>Admissions officers are well aware of the curves. Missing a question or two isn’t going to keep you out of the Ivies or anything. I took the test three times, and what was an 800 one test was as low as a 740 the next. Admissions officers care more about the general range of your scores (high 600’s versus low 700’s versus high 700’s versus a very consistent domination of 800’s). Considering that the difference between a 750 and 800 can be as few as two questions on the Math section, it isn’t going to be held against you.</p>
<p>A test like Math IIC, however, has a different ring to it. It relies less on gimmicky tricks and chews into more advanced topics – an 800 can be achieved even if you miss like 4 questions, and the math isn’t all that hard. A 720 Math IIC though would indicate that you missed a fair handful of questions and probably speaks more about your math ability than the SAT I.</p>
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<p>Bingo! Then why are you continuing to beat on a dead horse? Shoulda/woulda/coulda don’t matter unless the colleges want it to.</p>
<p>^ But it literally does matter for collegiate scholarship programs. Collegeboard may be able to do what they want, but isn’t it CB’s assumed responsibility to provide an accurate assessment of the abilities of a college/scholarship applicant? True, it is the college/scholarship that chooses what to make of the numbers, but it seems unfair to give way for that arbitrariness in what should be the most concrete element of the application.</p>
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<p>Huh? The SAT is designed for college admissions, period. What others do with it is up to them. Would the fact that some employers on Wall Street use the SAT as a screening tool mean CollegeBoard should “assume” that responsibility hiring decisions, too? Note, in this instance, future employers are basing hiring decision of a 22 year-old on a test that s/he took when they were 16 or 17…</p>
<p>^ Like I said, it seems irresponsible to allow for math scores (700-800) that colleges could easily interpret concretely yet are often much more arbitrary and subject to the curve than scores in other ranges. Just because others choose what to do with the scores doesn’t mean it’s fair to expect that when Collegeboard provides concrete score numbers, colleges and scholarship programs will know and incorporate into their decisions the unreliability of certain score ranges. If Collegeboard extended this logic to all portions of the SAT, the SAT score could end up being as indicative of general aptitude as eye color, and schools most likely wouldn’t use it, but because this issue is largely confined to the upper tier of math scores, it is a problem that often remains unnoticed.</p>
<p>^“Like I said, it seems irresponsible to allow for math scores (700-800) that colleges could easily interpret concretely yet are often much more arbitrary and subject to the curve than scores in other ranges.”</p>
<p>Your premise is faulty. What part of that don’t you understand??? Colleges do NOT want to finely interpret math scores on the SAT Reasoning Test. They…Do…Not…</p>
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Many scholarship programs are based off of strict math+verbal SAT cutoffs. Just one of many: [Florida</a> Student Scholarship and Grant Programs](<a href=“http://www.floridastudentfinancialaid.org/SSFAD/bf/fasrequire.htm]Florida”>http://www.floridastudentfinancialaid.org/SSFAD/bf/fasrequire.htm)
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<p>Caltech’s 25-75 SATI Math range is 770-800; perhaps you may plead correlation and not causation in this particular situation, but the score range is so confined that this really can’t be much of an accident. MIT, which is known for having a more “holistic” admissions process, has a 720-800 range, so while you are right that at many colleges these fine distinctions do not occur, at particularly test-heavy schools (Caltech is one of them) they are significant.</p>
<p>State school admissions also often depend invariably on SAT scores. Albeit, if you need a high 700s score as opposed to a low/mid 700s score to get into the state school of your choice, you probably have some CR deficiencies. But it does happen, probably with immigrants more than anyone else.</p>
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<p>Again, how is this different from employers using the SAT for employment decisions? CollegeBoard is an nonprofit membership of colleges, not scholarship programs.</p>
<p>Engineering/tech schools also use the Math 2 Subject Test for admissions…hmmmmm</p>
<p>Scholarship programs within colleges? And state college admissions is often directly contingent on SAT scores; CollegeBoard thus has responsibility in that regard.</p>
<p>So what? I got a 770 with 1 wrong…</p>
<p>OP, have you even heard of a bell curve? Because there are less people at the extreme end of the bell curve, when scaling the score there will be a larger difference between each raw score in the scaled score than in the middle of the curve.</p>
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<p>Ok, I’ll bite, (but not sure why…). </p>
<p>Which public/state college is so selective that it cares about the difference between a ~730 and ~780 (just two numbers to use as an example)? Name one college, any one…</p>
<p>btw: Harvard don’t care. Yale don’t care. Princeton don’t care. Stanford don’t care. MIT don’t care… And if the most selective private colleges in the country don’t care…hmmmmmm</p>
<p>Like I said: it would have to take rather extreme circumstances, say a <500 in CR, for the difference to truly matter in terms of automated state school admissions. But it still is a possible circumstance that probably happens more often than we think (on the other side of the spectrum, I recall a student in a small SAT prep course who scored high 700s on CR but high 400s on math).</p>
<p>Also, you said earlier that CollegeBoard has to draw the line somewhere in terms of where they stop the scores (should it be 700? 800? 1000? etc). My response: isn’t it most logical to draw the line where it has been determined that after this number, score differences are negligible; but before this number, score differences actually say something? If you leave, say, a 70-80 point range where score differences are negligible (in other words, from 720-800), then you leave the door open for all sorts of ambiguity and unreasonable measurements. Going back to elite school admissions: the only thing we truly know is that there is a trend that higher scores will increase admissions chances. While I think we can reasonably assume that as the scores go higher and higher the admissions chances start to plateau, but can we assume for sure that there is ever a true plateau? How can you be, knowing that these colleges have to consider thousands of applications, of which there is only one group of universal standards, the college test scores?</p>
<p>There really is no reason to not remove the spectrum of ambiguity, unless there is disagreement as to whether it is truly an ambiguous spectrum or not. And you seem to at least agree that it is.</p>
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<p>Ahh, but there’s the rub: at the 500 level, missing one does not cost 30 score points. At that level, where even you admit it MIGHT matter, there is little ambiguity.</p>
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<p>I neither agree nor disagree. I suggest that it DOES NOT MATTER to colleges to parse the differences between the 99.97% and the 99.98%. IMO, the magic cutoff is 740+ for unhooked candidates to HYP et al.</p>