Proof that the SAT of the early 1990’s was much harder

As far as easier to get in: I really think that that must have been more income-based back then. I had an SAT (yes, I remember it–1490, no studying, who studied?) that, re-centered, would be 75th percentile at most uber-selective colleges today. I also graduated 5 out of almost a thousand students.

But the one reach I applied for, and it shouldn’t have been that reachy (high level LAC, not Ivy or anything near it), waitlisted me. I’d applied for FA–would have needed a lot.

So every time people post about how apparently easy it was to get into school, not gonna lie–it stings.

Oh, heck! I must be a lot smarter than I thought I was. And even more of an underachiever than I had feared.

Well, I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer but I know better than to get into a standardized-test measuring contest with D18. She had multiple 99th percentile scores (the percentile is all that really matters) while my knuckle-dragging self got around a 95th score back in 1980 or so.

I don’t think my ego can handle this …

@droppedit My kids have lapped me in so many ways it really isn’t a contest any more.

I don’t remember what my score is, but I know my senior outscored me by quite a bit. He started taking it in middle school and took it every spring until this June when he prepped a little and got his 99% score and was happy. He has had a better high school education that I had and was better prepared for the test. Kids these days take MANY more timed bubble tests than I ever took. I took the test once with no prep and forgot about it. I can spew plenty of numbers from my childhood but I have no idea what I got. My only option for college was a state school so it wasn’t on my radar. I scored sky high on grad school testing when I had a undergrad education, a little prep and a little more test experience under my belt.

I actually think my kid, my husband, and I are all probably pretty close in terms of actual intelligence though we all have slightly different strengths and weaknesses.

@ChangeTheGame


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I still know my best friend's phone number from 9th grade and I haven't called the number in 24 years.

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Long term memory is very strange.

I remember the lock combination on my bicycle from my childhood… 16-20-12. Not only that, but is was a master lock with a very long shackle. I have not seen that lock or bike since the mid 1970’s.

I can’t remember my grandparents full phone#, but the first 3 “digits” were EV8. Also haven’t dialed that since 1978 when they moved out of the “EV8”. I’ll leave it to the reader as an exercise to figure out where that was.

However, I have no idea what I had for breakfast yesterday.

As for the old 1970’s SAT. The verbal was brutal compared to today. Even though I probably got high 700s in math without any studying, the current SAT math didn’t seem much different. Both my kids breezed to an 800 in math and were over 700 on the verbal. There is no way their verbal score would have been anywhere near that number on the old exam. The vocabulary/analogy section would have killed them. I’m actually surprised at their weak vocabulary today.

Based on what I see at my own kid’s relatively elite private HS, I’m not. There seems to be no time for reading and thinking anymore. The “best” kids are too busy running around like chickens without their heads trying to build a resume that will impress some adcoms they know are lurking in the hazy future for them.

I remember phone numbers from childhood. I’ve had a cellphone since about middle school so I haven’t needed to remember a number since at least then.

Still can’t tell you what my SAT score was- which I took in 2008.
I can tell you my overall ACT score but couldn’t tell you the breakdown if my life depended on it.
Can’t tell you my highschool, undergrad, grad school, or even current GPA.

I don’t know how people remember this stuff.

So it is pretty much a consensus that are kids are more advanced than we were at the same point (even though I will never admit that to them;) But I would like to flip the question. Would they have reached your level if they grew up in household you grew up in? I would say may daughter would have easily made it, but I think my son would have struggled in the macho, ultra-competitive place I grew up.

I took the SATs in 1986. Back then, Latin was a very popular language in my public high school. Parents believed that it would help kids with their SAT words. I’m wondering if that was an isolated thing. Latin is less popular now, and the SAT words have gone away.

I learned all my SAT words doing theater from a very young age. Gilbert & Sullivan are excellent vocabulary builders! The problem was, I didn’t know which words other kids knew and which they didn’t so I constantly got teased for trying to “show off.”

I graduated in 1990 and I definitely took it twice and studied for it - to the extent you could. If you didn’t already have an expansive vocabulary, there really wasn’t a heck of a lot you could do. But people definitely prepped for the SAT back then. I’m sure students in prep schools paid for SAT prep courses or were prepped in school.

Much of the prep back then was based on test taking techniques (guessing strategy, time management, doing the math problems by plugging the answers back in, etc.) and vocabulary cramming.

Of course, there was the longer term stealth prep of English teachers from 9th-11th grades giving weekly vocabulary words that were probably from lists of supposedly “common SAT words”.

^ I definitely didn’t prep for the PSAT. Maybe some for the SAT. I know there were Subject Test prep books back then.

Playing AD&D was where I learned all my PSAT and SAT words back in the early 1980s. While taking the PSAT, I recognized a lot of words from my all my time spent reading and re-reading the DM guide and the Monster Manual.

I told S17 this, and sure enough he came out of tests telling me he’d recognized words from D&D guides.

(I still outscored him on the PSAT. Ha! But I think even with the recentering he outscored me on the SAT.)

^ My prep consisted of reading books. For some reason, and not due to SES because my parents were high school dropouts, and most people I dealt with except for high school teachers were also dropouts, I decided I wasn’t well read enough. I read 50+ novels in the summer between sophomore and junior years (had nothing better to do except work my part time job at a butcher shop/deli 30 hours per week that summer) - everything from Hardy to Hesse, with a little Mann, Kafka and Dostoevsky thrown in for variety.

I even read some twice in different translations because I saw an essay somewhere that argued that the Constance Garnett translations were anachronistic. After the recentering, my score back then would be something like 840 today. I don’t think kids today have that sort of freedom to just read and think - too busy trying to figure out whether any activity they engage in will “pay off” for college.

Getting back to the SAT today. What chance does a low SES kid stand today to distinguish himself on readily identifiable metrics like SAT scores and GPA? I didn’t even know that extracurriculars could make a difference for college admissions when I was in high school. To this day, although I have degrees from two very top schools (T3 USNWR), no one in my immediate family has ever stepped foot on either campus. (I skipped both graduations - no one in my family ever cared!)

This is sadly true, but so unecessary. If they would only broaden their horizens a bit with regard to school choice, they would regain the freedom to actually live their lives, be who they are, and end up at the school that fits.

My H, my kids, and I, all had scores that were roughly equivalent. None of us prepped, or were high SES. Basically middle. So I think they would have done similar back in the 70s as us, and I would have done the same as them when they took tests. I contribute it to all of us massively loving reading, and all being really good problem/puzzle solvers. Never had any experience with “test taking techniques.”

Given the widespread belief that one’s college name and prestige is highly important to get good job and career opportunities after college (how true that is varies by industry and type of job, of course), and the fact that some employers ask college students and graduates for their high school SAT scores, it may not be surprising that many high school students and their parents put so much focus on polishing the student’s high school credentials.

Conversely, US college admissions was much easier then, for balance, haha.

It is weird to hear so many parents my age say they did not study for their tests. Everyone I knew well at my public high school studied for the SAT’s back in the 1980’s, and I was one of the few ones of my friends to study just on my own as opposed to taking a preparatory course.

I remember studying vocabulary flash cards by candlelight, due to Hurricane Gloria’s having wiped out our electrical power for over a week, prior to the PSAT back when I was in high school. And then, in the wee hours of the morning before the test, there was an earthquake! When I yelled for my parents, the short quake had ended and my mom told me it was just a bad dream because I was nervous about the test. The next morning, after dropping me off at the high school for the test, my mom heard the news about the earthquake and worried that she had sent me into the test thinking either she did not believe me or I was crazy!

My son’s scores are much higher than mine were, and he too self-studied as opposed to taking a course (and probably spent less time studying for the SAT than I did), but both of us had scores that were within the typical range for our classmates at each time. (Same college.) Yes, test scores got higher in general, but top colleges also got harder to get into. I often think that I never would have gotten into my college nowadays!