What do SATs mean?

<p>Yeah, what the question says. Some are calling them IQ. Quite clearly they do not exactly predict success in college (my friend has SAT 100 pts lower than mine, she took private test preps and I never did) HOWEVER, she is making better grades than me in college. Do you have to be intelligent to score 1450+ on the SAT? Anyone have personal stories or broader theories?</p>

<p>they are not IQ!</p>

<p>SATs, if i am not mistaken, were supposed to measure how you will perform in your freshman year of college.</p>

<p>Its just a quantitative way of measuring your critical reading and basic mathematics skills, and now essay writing, pretty much.</p>

<p>definitely not a measure of IQ.</p>

<p>Do you think they do a good job of measuring these specific skills, then, since there isn't a direct correlation between them and classroom performance?</p>

<p>The only things we know for sure is that top collegea want high SATs. Whether or not it's because it's a predictor of college performance is not important. But for whatever reasons they know what SAT scores hey want from the unhooked, from athletes, from URMs etc. and there seem to be few exceptions.</p>

<p>umm, suze, I don 't think that really answered my question. Then again, maybe I wasn't making myself clear. In my personal experiences (limited, I'll grant you) students at ivies and other school with very high SATs do tend to be nearly uniformly very smart in their dialogue and written work, moreso than has been my experience at other elite schools with less rigorous acceptance standards. So are SATs some predictor of students' thinking and academic capabilities, do SATs have no correlation with students' abilities, or is the relationship more complex? For instance, I once had this idea that you do have to be a quick analytical and critical thinker to do well on SATs, but that a low SAT score did not necessarily indicate you weren't... obviously that idea is based on my limited experience. All the people I've known with 1450+ SATs genuinly impressed me w/ their thinking/academic capabilities, but then some that had low SATs have impressed me as well. (And no, I'm not one of those people who friggin' asks people their SATs, but it has occasionally come up amongst friends)</p>