<p>I'm just curious... does anyone happen to know where the 200-800 scale originally came from? I know that at this point it basically only bases itself on itself, and imagine it probably stays around mainly out of tradition.</p>
<p>I am particularly interested in the specific mechanics and statistics behind it. Is there a reason it starts at 200, or is it just to make scores look bigger?</p>
<p>maybe so that it doesn't get confused w/ ACT 0-36</p>
<p>Good question.......anyone?</p>
<p>its starts at 200 b/c of the deductions... in other words, if you guessed on all of them and got every single one wrong, then you would have -200 or something like that... but since you got none of them write, CB wouldnt have a score to subtract it from so you would get a neg score... but they dont like neg scores, so they boosted it up to 200 so the lowest you can get is 0..
get it? </p>
<p>basically, its hard to get 1600 but its even harder to get a zero b/c you would have to get no right and all wrong</p>
<p>ugh...stinky socks....</p>
<p>they came up with that scale because if u get the reverse of the nummbers and u sort of subtract them and add 1...then u get 007, bond, james bond.......look...008 minus 002 = 006 + 1 is 007.....and 007 is the secret agent which they use to fool people into getting bad grades</p>
<p>Obviously the orgin of the scale is that there are two sections, each with a possible of 800, and you add the two, then you get a perfect score of a 1600. Duh.</p>
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<p>Isn't it easier to get 0 than 1600? You can probably only miss 3-4 max to get 1600, and miss all the get 0. However, there are 3/4 wrong answers for each problem rather than just 1 right answer, and for every problem, you can eliminate at least 1 wrong problem. Haha, just something to think about.</p>
<p>Actually, a raw score of 0 is scaled to about a 250... you have to get a negative raw score in order to get a 200, and 200 is the lowest score they will give.</p>
<p>That makes sense, though- a 200 is only a few points below 0, so I bet originally it was right at 0, and any negative scores were just "rounded up." That fits with the 1/4 point guessing penalty numerically; I'm suprised that didn't occur to me.</p>
<p>from mysterious aliens in a distant galaxy</p>
<p>It started as centered at 500, with each standard deviation up or down being 100 scaled score points. There has never been a 0 standard score on the SAT.</p>
<p>The original SAT test from 1926 (given just to a test group) was actually done on a 200 to 800 scale although at the time the verbal and math were combined as one. It had to do as mentioned above with picking a midpoint and determining a standard deviation from it. It also had to do with making the test appear unigue from prior tests upon which it was based. Originally there was the Binet-Simon scale developed for IQ tests in the early 1900's where 100 was deemed the average and the scale was from 50 to 150 (you could do higher or lower but few did). A form of that test with changes was adopted by the Army for WWI and called the Army Alpha Beta Test which was used to determine who would be trained as officers and also used the Benet-Simon scale. One of the principal administrators of that test was Carl Brigham, a Princeton professor. He then developed the SAT from those tests and, partly to assure that he would not be accused of copying, he went to designating the average score as 500 with a scale from 200 to 800. Brigham was a proud member of the American Eugenics Society who wrote books and spoke in favor of its philosophy, the main one of which was that white anglo saxon males were superior to all others and that America would be destroyed if immigrants (such as Italians, Jews, Oriental, etc.) and existing minorities were allowed to mix with the superior group. While involved with the Army test, he noted that white upper crust males usually outscored the immigrant and minority groups and became the officers. His idea with the SAT was to have a college admission test that would accomplish the same thing and keep immigrants and minorities out of college and away from the superior white anglo saxon males that would score well and get into college. Harvard was actually the first, in the early 1930's, to require Brigham's test for admission, Cooper Union and Princeton soon followed. Brigham later renounced his own test (he gave up his white supremecist beliefs as they became socially unacceptable with the rise of Hitler), concluded the reason white males did better was because the test was biased towards them and they were better educated than others and thus could do better.</p>
<p>um what a twisted story</p>
<p>It's technically scored out of 1000, but they realize that their test is not accurate enough to make a distinction between someone who got an 800 or a 900 or 1000, so it's just truncated at 800.</p>
<p>The fellow who invented the SAT was a very bright young man from Ohio. After developing a series of difficult questions for the test, he then faced the problem of how to score the results.</p>
<p>At the time, his seven year old son was an absolute terror of a kid: tearing pages out of his dad's favorite books, torturing the family cat: a real "Dennis the Mena..." Actually, the kid's name was Dennis!</p>
<p>One day Dennis got out the saw from his Jr. carpenter's kit and sawed all his dad's pencils in half. Then he grabbed his dad's ruler and sawed a couple of inches off one end---and twice as many from the other end.</p>
<p>Later that evening his dad discovered what remained of his ruler...</p>
<p>...and that was how the SAT scale was born.</p>
<hr>
<p>Dennis later dropped out of high school and got a job making wooden matches for the Diamond Match Company.</p>
<p>Hahaha .</p>
<p>One effect of the nature of questions and the truncation of the scale is that it provides no differentiation at the ends of the scale. While there's little value in sorting out the worst from the very worst scores, there is clearly some value in differentiating between, say, the students who all score above 750 on the SAT1V. (A math prodigy and a competent student who's good at algebra may both score 800.) While they have mastered that content, there's certainly lots more that could be tested. It seems doubtful that this will happen in the context of the SAT I, though.</p>
<p>Maybe that's what the SAT IIs are there for...</p>
<p>See an extensive article about this in "Atlantic Monthly" Sept 1995</p>
<p>Roger Dooley wrote, "One effect of the nature of questions and the truncation of the scale is that it provides no differentiation at the ends of the scale." </p>
<p>Well, that's the way I felt when I took the SAT I when I was a high school senior in the Stone Age (the 1970s): it was too easy. I have since heard Chinese graduate students in the United States--and I am talking about students in nonquantitative subjects--deride the math section of the GRE exam as a test of "junior high math"--which is exactly what it is in terms of the standard curriculum in schools in urban areas of China. </p>
<p>But that's less of a problem than it appears, I later realized. What the SAT I test, the ACT test, an IQ test, and really any kind of purported ability test does is sort people into a rank order. It is enough if the ORDINAL characteristics of a test are plausible: if the kids who score higher are plausibly "better at math" than the kids who score lower, more refined details hardly matter. </p>
<p>If one is an admission officer seeking to fill spaces in the math class at one of the top five (ten?) math schools in the United States, which could fill up all their spots in next year's freshmen math classes just with applicants who scored 800 on the SAT math section, then there is a BIT of an issue. Of course looking at an applicant's transcript will reveal which applicant has already received a 5 on the AP Calculus BC exam, and will reveal which applicant has taken a course in abstract algebra at a local college. MIT's application form </p>
<p><a href="http://admissions.mit.edu/resources/pdf/MITpart2.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://admissions.mit.edu/resources/pdf/MITpart2.pdf</a> </p>
<p>includes spaces to indicate scores on the AMC 12 </p>
<p><a href="http://www.unl.edu/amc/e-exams/e6-amc12/amc12.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.unl.edu/amc/e-exams/e6-amc12/amc12.html</a> </p>
<p>and AIME </p>
<p><a href="http://www.unl.edu/amc/e-exams/e7-aime/aime.html%5B/url%5D">http://www.unl.edu/amc/e-exams/e7-aime/aime.html</a> </p>
<p>tests, and so does Caltech's application form. </p>
<p><a href="http://admissions.caltech.edu/contact/applying/application.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://admissions.caltech.edu/contact/applying/application.pdf</a> </p>
<p>So the top math colleges know other ways to identify top math students and make distinctions among applicants who share perfect scores on the SAT I math section. </p>
<p>In the book Questions and Admissions: Reflections on 100,000 Admissions Decisions at Stanford (1995), former chief admissions officer Jean H. Fetter tells how Stanford's math faculty finally insisted on having the chance to review applications by students intending to major in math, with the hope of increasing the yield of top math students at Stanford. The Stanford faculty looks at various issues (mostly mentioned above) to identify the math stars among the many high-SAT-scoring applicants to Stanford. Chuck Hughes in his recent book similarly identifies tests and summer programs that Harvard looks at for identifying top math students. The SAT I is only the beginning for standing out as an applicant to a highly selective math program. </p>
<p>By the way, thanks for your administrator messages to the board, and for the board in general. This is a very useful site that I have recommended to many other parents.</p>