I am confused. How can someone who got a 800 on the Math ll SAT subject test only be in the 79th % ? Please help me understand this. The college board sight did not help explain it to me.
I would take it to mean that 21% of the people that took the test received a score of 800. It kinda makes you wonder why some schools require this stuff.
The pool of test takers for the Math 2 subject test includes a high proportion of exceptional students, the types of students who apply to selective colleges requiring/recommending subject test scores and who were at least one grade level advanced in math. The students who were not advanced enough in math to take precalc as juniors then take the Math 1 subject test instead.
It is important to understand that for several subjects, the percentiles are depressed because so few colleges request Subject Tests, that the ones that do are the ultra selective ones. As a result, it is the high achieving kids taking the tests. No AO is sitting on the floor cross-referencing scores with percentiles.
If you think the percentiles for M2 are crazy, look at Chinese and Korean which is in addition to the explanation above, is skewed by heritage speakers.