I was talking to a friend at work about how my son likes to mock how low my standardized test scores were (1260 SAT with 510V and 750M) back in 1993. He loves to talk smack to me as that is our father son dynamic (“I could have gotten that score in middle school”) about how students today are just smarter than their parents (but I have more wisdom) and that schools and college admissions are so much more competitive than “the old days” (I don’t disagree with that assessment). Thank goodness for the internet as there was still some proof out their that today’s SAT is definitely not an apples to apples comparison (Avg SAT score of class of 1992 was a 899). Thank you, internet for the link that made my son back up and say, “Ok, your old man SAT data has some validity to your claims”.
The scores were recentered in 1995; the table on page 3 of https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED563025.pdf shows how to convert pre-1995 SAT scores to post-1995 SAT scores.
Your 510V/750M would have been recentered to 590V/760M (total 1350).
There was also a redesign in 2005, and another one in 2016. It seems difficult to find a concordance table for the 2005 redesign, if such a concordance table exists. It is possible that the old V and M sections were supposed to give scores equivalent to the new CR and M sections (the W section was formerly an Achievement or SAT-II test).
For the 2016 redesign, there is a concordance table at https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/pdf/higher-ed-brief-sat-concordance.pdf , which suggests that a 1350 CR+M on the 2005 SAT is like a 1410 on the 2016 SAT.
I love to feel better but it wouldn’t really fair considering how much harder kids these days work.
The newest SAT is a lot more achievement test and a lot less aptitude test. With the amount of study I had when I was a high school student, or anyone I know of my age, we wouldn’t have come even close if we took the same test in our time.
@ucbalumnus Thank you for the links. There is nothing like more proof with my kids.
@SculptorDad I think I may have been the only person back then to prep for the SAT, because after my terrible sophomore year in high school, my own father made me sit in a room looking at a SAT Book. 2 full months of looking at that stupid book for a few hours a day. I could never figure out the verbal section back then (too many vocab. words I did not know the meaning of and it was hard to study for it) but it really helped my math score. Today, with the complicated vocabulary now gone, I think my score would have jumped even more than the re-centering data shows because understanding a passage is much easier when you understand the context and all of the words being used. Plus, I don’t remember anyone taking the SAT more than once, not one person (a few people also took the ACT once as well) which is a big advantage for today’s students.
I got a high SAT score back in the day. But I doubt I could do nearly as well on today’s version. I could breeze through the English sections, but would be stumped by the math. I was never a math person and today’s test is far more geered towards specific knowledge and less towards pure reasoning and logic. I was a logic kid. The old test was tailor made for me. If I had to apply today, it wouldn’t be pretty. But its nice to believe that my old score means I’m smart 
If you were really strong in vocabulary the old test was definitely easier.
Agree, no one I know retook the SAT. no one did prep except for what they force you to do in English class. I specifically remember people saying you couldn’t really prep for it because it tests what you actually know. Haha good excuse not to study.
PS, my score was awful
I never worked as hard in HS as my D19 has. I think it was a product of the time and my HS. So I don’t have the scores she has. And it was easier to get into colleges back then. That is just a numbers game for sure. Colleges have held their enrollment pretty much the same but the number of kids has increased.
Yes and no. The prestige and relative perceived quality of colleges has changed pretty dramatically to take account of the population growth.
When I applied to colleges in the 1980s, kids with my scores (high) and grades (A- average in a tough test-in high school) looked at schools like Emory, Rice, University of Chicago, Cornell and Columbia as “safeties.” We were right. But not today!
I have long thought that one of the main reasons kids need to work so hard today in high school is because it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish applicants on the basis of test scores and grades. The grade inflation has been relentless, such that an A- is now a poor GPA for kids targeting the top colleges. Similarly, and appropos of this thread, the SAT has lost much of its ability to distinguish at the higher ends of the scoring range. These factors alone have pushed more kids into the “possible” category, after which distinctions must largely be made on the basis of extracurricular activities and independently achieved academic distinctions. Kids and their parents have responded to these trends by seeking to distinguish themselves on as many metrics as possible, contributing to the “frenzy.”
The pressures show no sign of letting up, as the larger society seems hell bent on removing academic ability as a primary criterion for admission, or at least masking differences in the upper parts of the distribution in the standard scoring and grading metrics.
The vocabulary based questions that were most of the old SAT Verbal section were easy (and quick to answer) if you knew the words, hard if you did not. When I went to high school, the English teachers gave weekly vocabulary words to learn and be quizzed on. Presumably, this was a kind of stealth SAT preparation. There were also books of thousands of SAT words back then for those who wanted to cram them as part of test preparation, although test preparation was not as common back then.
The old SAT Math section was based on algebra and geometry, so it was effectively like an achievement test on those courses.
There were also SAT-specific test-taking skills that some figured out themselves, or learned in test preparation books and classes. Examples would be guessing strategy and time management (within a section, do the quick easy questions first, then go back to the hard ones).
Parents sometimes evaluate their kids’ test scores by comparing them with their OWN scores. My own scores were weird. I didn’t study for the SAT. I first saw the SAT when I got into the exam room in my senior year. (Somehow I missed the national merit stage.) The results were quite lopsided. But I got into some fine colleges. That was in the previous century. I tried to prep my kids mainly by psyching them up. They were not interested in actual prep, practice exams. etc.
My kids had many opportunities to take the tests and become familiar with content, format, time constraints, and so on. But the kids weren’t obsessed with admissions or tests. And they didn’t study or prep for any of those tests for undergrad admission. However, they had chances to repeat some of the exams, beginning with “Talent Search” in middle-school, then the PSAT. No.1 “aced” all of the tests he took in junior and senior year. No. 2 did well enough to get into every college she applied to, but her interest was in attending art school for which her grades and portfolio meant much more.
“There were also books of thousands of SAT words back then for those who wanted to cram them as part of test preparation, although test preparation was not as common back then.”
What? who would memorize a thousand words late into a Friday night hoping that a few would show up on the test the next day? never heard of such a thing - especially when the words, I don’t know, like loquacious, garrulous, verbose, never showed up on the test!
There was enough of a market for SAT vocabulary cramming that books listing purported SAT words were sold. Also, some other prep books contained smaller lists of what they thought were more common SAT words.
Not so much a larger society conspiracy, but the local motivations of various participants.
The SAT and ACT businesses know that the volume is in the broad middle, not the top 1% versus 0.1% versus 0.01% of test takers, so the tests and scoring reflect that.
In terms of grade inflation, local schools are biased toward it, because a little more inflation may help the schools’ students have a little better college results that the school can advertise.
I really don’t think that it has gotten harder to get into a good college then it ever was. It was ALWAYS hard to get into Harvard. A good student with good grades and a good SAT score could pretty much count on getting into a school a bit below — Cornell, Penn, Columbia, Georgetown etc. Vassar, Weslayan, Brandeis and NYU, etc. were basically safeties for top students.
What has changed is that there are far more schools which are “a bit below” A student with strong grades and a good SAT score can still count on getting into a “bit below” school as long as she realizes that NYU, Brandeis, Vassar, Tulane, Kenyon et. al. are the “bit below” schools now. The problem is that there are pockets of the applicant pool who haven’t gotten the message – or their parents haven’t and they still believe that they should be able to get into HYP or “at least” Cornell. They do themselves a disservice by not catching up with the times.
The vocabulary killed me and my entire inner-city school. I took the PSAT as a 10th grader and made a 410V and so I took etymology my 2nd semester 10th grade year and studied all summer afterwards and during junior year and still only pulled it up 100 points by the spring of my junior year. I am pretty sure no one that I knew at the time got to a 550 on the verbal. I would say the average for the students I dealt with averaged under a 400, which is what I saw on the data linked in the thread for African Americans at the time. I think you can study and fix errors with today’s verbal section, but if your vocabulary was terrible to start with back then, it was almost impossible to have a lot of growth in a short period of time. When you look back, the 75th percentile for the verbal section was a 500!
@mackinaw My kids are not competitive at all but I grew up in a time and place where that being competitive was very important to everyone. But my kids have this weird thing where they will get competitive with me because I have beaten them at everything I possibly could growing up and most times badly (I still need to win even against them). They asked me my scores and decided that I was going to lose this particular battle and would do what it took to make it a reality.
@ucbalumnus The grade inflation is just a sign of the times. Just another form of participation awards, but on a larger scale.
I’m surprised you all remember your SAT scores. I can’t even remember what the scale was when I took it!
@suzy100 I have 1 gift that I have been given and have known about since I was a little boy. I pretty much don’t forget any number that I have ever focused on long enough to remember. I still know my best friend’s phone number from 9th grade and I haven’t called the number in 24 years.
Most kids learn vocabulary through inference by reading and by listening to people talking. Just think of how many words the average 6 year old knows, and I don’t think many 6 year olds have pored over vocabulary lists. This process continues naturally as a child grows up. I never had a vocabulary list or quiz ever in high school, and I did just fine on the SAT (taken once in junior year after doing exactly two practice tests).
There are two factors at work: culture/environment and innate ability. If you live in a home environment in which reading is not encouraged and/or the use of more sophisticated language is limited, you will be at a disadvantage. To some degree this can be made up for by innate ability and inclination. It is a bit of a mystery, but I have seen kids who reach the level of reading Jules Verne novels in the 1st grade who had parents without even a high school education. And I have seen very wealthy, privileged kids whose parents have tried everything (and then some) who cannot seem to grasp Jules Verne in the 11th grade.
No one thinks environment counts for nothing in these sorts of tasks, but people should keep in mind that there is usually more variation within a school than across schools.
@SatchelSF There was no sophisticated language in my home ever used, but reading was a part of my daily life. I think the issue sometimes deals with what one reads. The local newspaper and magazines that I read daily as a child just didn’t have SAT vocabulary words often. I have never been a fiction reader (even today stick to books on retirement, biographies, online newspapers and CC), so I think I would still have a hard time with SAT vocabulary (although I have to pull out the dictionary for CC sometimes) because you are right about innate ability.
You can see that with some state universities as well. A generation or two ago in California, UCB and UCLA could be match or likely for many students, and many students could apply to UCSD, UCD, UCSB, UCI as likelies or safeties. Now, with a much larger state population (which also has the top end of the academic scale fortified by kids of immigrants who initially came as PhD students) but proportionally less increase in size of the universities, many 3.7 unweighted-GPA students and their parents are shocked that (for them), UCB and UCLA are reaches, UCSD, UCD, UCSB, UCI are high matches (or reaches for the more popular majors), and only UCR and UCM may be likelies among the UCs. Among the CSUs, some campuses and majors have also gotten much more selective (e.g. CPSLO, CS at SJSU).