<p>Here's a post of mine from another thread. There has been a lot of research done on the correlation between the (old, non-recentered SAT) and IQ.</p>
<p>"Finally, you just can't convince me that someone who missed one or two is appreciably less intelligent than someone who missed none. They MIGHT be, but I think that that would be difficult (impossible) to prove with the SAT alone, recentering or not."</p>
<p>I would agree with you on a case by case basis. That is, "he got an 800 and missed no questions and I got a 780 and missed one question. That means he is DEFINITELY smarter than me." Not necessarily. Not in that one case. I agree.</p>
<p>HOWEVER, this is EXACTLY what it means when we talk about statistical distributions. In fact, this is the VERY reason the high IQ societies decided to accept the SAT score as useful for admissions. They spent a lot of time and money correlating SAT scores with Stanford-Binet, Wechsler, and other IQ test scores, and they found that, in fact, the SAT score (of the non-recentered test) correlated QUITE STRONGLY with IQ as measured by Stanford-Binet--even, and especially, at the high end. That's why the test was useful to them!!</p>
<p>What that means is that, if you take all the people that missed no questions on the SAT and averaged their IQ scores on the Stanford-Binet, and did the same for those who missed ONE question on the SAT, you would find that the average IQ of the former group IS HIGHER than the latter group, in a large and statistically significant way. That is, as a group, those who missed NO questions on the SAT are, in fact SMARTER than those who missed one question, as measured by IQ score.</p>
<p>That is a statistical FACT. </p>
<p>If you'd like to actually read the painful and very detailed discussion of this issue, I invite you to read the following report from the Prometheus Society. This is a high IQ soceity that takes on the top 1/30,000 people. That is, the top 99.997% of the population based on IQ score. Think this is a joke? It isn't. I direct you to section 8.5 of the report, where they discuss SAT and its correlation to IQ.</p>
<p>So, as much as you'd like to believe that "missing one question" doesn't mean anything, it actually means quite a lot. </p>
<p>A lot of people spent a lot of time and a lot of statistics and a lot of data to prove that it does. </p>
<p>So, it was somewhat difficult to prove, as you suspected. However, it has, in fact, been proven.</p>
<p>"Genius" is generally considered "above IQ=140". On the old, non-recentered SAT, that would be about a 1350 M+V, about the 99.5%. That seems to be about the same for the new SAT M+V.</p>
<p>Note: Mensa considers that scores from after January 31, 1994, "No longer correlate with an IQ test."</p>