It seems like you can get 5 wrong and get an 800.
Im taking it on June 2019
I’m not sure that there are any Subject Tests which require 0 wrong to get an 800. If you want to see a large curve, look at physics or world history where you can get an 800 with almost 20 questions wrong.
As someone who’s taken the test, the last 5 problems tend to require a good amount of visualization or are just doggone time consuming so I suppose the curve accounts for the Difficulty of those problems
There is still a penalty for guessing wrong AFAIK on the subject tests (deduction of 1/4 point from the raw score for each wrong answer). So you need to make a distinction between wrong and blank.
On Math Level 2 you can usually get around ~5-7 wrong or 6-9 blank and still get an 800, depending on the curve for that particular administration of the test.
Physics is a little “easier” - ~12-16 wrong or 15-20 blank.
You might find this HS counselor’s guide helpful: http://p1cdn4static.sharpschool.com/UserFiles/Servers/Server_881339/File/Counseling/SAT%20Subject%20Test%20Resource%20Guide.pdf
@SatchelSF Thanks for sharing this guide. Very helpful!
What would you guys recommend to study for the math II?
I’ve taken Math II once. In my preparation for the test, I was consistently scoring 800’s while on test day I completely blanked out and score a 730.
To the original question, here’s my take:
The purpose of Subject Tests, unlike the SAT, it to evaluate your knowledge of a topic. If you know the material , you will get an 800, unlike the SAT which has a specific statistical distribution curve.
The Math 2 test covers a broad variety of math topics, not all of which are taught in any single Pre-Calc (or equivalent) course. So they don’t want to penalize students who 100% know the material they’ve been exposed to, but have never seen matrices/determinants or vectors or polar coordinates (or whatever).
Also, math has always been the subject with the most accelerated students. Look at the number of CTY award winners, SET members, etc., and how they qualified - highly skewed to math.
So a much larger percentage of math students are going to know all the topics very well and a significant percentage are going to get all of the questions correct. That’s why so many 800s, IMHO. (fwiw, my D is an active competitive math student, qualified for AIME in 9th grade, and found the Math 2 test pretty trivial. There are many students more advanced than her).