<p>The weird thing is that I’m in AP Calc, and I know most of those formulas posted by silverturle. God…</p>
<p>@gadgor That was the score i got last time preparing with PR . I think it basically about how many tests you practice regardless of book which you’re using to study the material. Its worth noting that Barrons overprepares us for Maths Level II . The conic section and a couple of others is just crazy</p>
<p>It is misleading to use percentiles or the number of students scoring 800s to determine the “easiness” of the respective tests. On a percentile basis, Chinese is the “easiest” test (44% of test takers got 800s in 2009), whereas “only” 11% of Math Level 2 takers received 800s. And yet, there were only about 3000 perfect scores on the Chinese tests, but 17000 perfect scores on Math Level 2 in 2009. The primary issue is that the group of people taking these tests are hardly random samples of graduating high school students. If it could be done, one would have to administer the non-language tests to, say, a random group of 10,000 college-bound juniors from around the country. In any case, “easy” is an elusive, relative concept.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In combination, the two measures are actually quite helpful in determining relative difficulty. While “difficulty” cannot be easily quantified, you’re taking this subjectivity too far; some tests are indeed more difficult to get 800 on. For example, I imagine that everyone would agree that it’s more difficult to get 800 on Literature than on CR. We can use the College Board’s data to support this.</p>
<p>Is literature IQ based? Like CR?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Imagine the following scenario: only people who tend to be weak in CR take the Literature test. Then, the same CB data would suggest that getting an 800 on Literature is easier than getting an 800 on CR.</p>
<p>The CB data alone aren’t enough: we don’t know the CR and Literature scores for each person who took both tests. Other sources such as the people here on CC (I assume this is what you mean by “everyone”) <em>do</em> provide a little of that data, so that you may be able to glean that, among people who scored 700+ on CR, many did not score 700+ on Literature (making numbers up as an example).</p>
<p>For math L1 vs L2, consider the following scenario. I have 244,000 known math students, and both tests are identical in difficulty. I give the L2 test to the strongest 156,000 math students and the L1 test to the 88,000 weakest, resulting in the CB data. How do I distinguish this situation from another in which the math students are all about the same in quality, and the L2 test is easier than the L1 test?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>You’re doing a fine job of establishing why some data could be misleading. But are you really suggesting the relevance of your examples to the actual debate? No reasonable person would assume that the Literature test-taking population is of lower average ability than the CR test-taking population.</p>
<p>I never said the scenarios reflected reality. 
But you’re clearly pulling in other data, which may be perfectly OK, just more limited in scope and the conclusions you can draw. For me, I would like to have more L1 score vs. L2 score data, even if it were from the fairly lofty realm of those who post here on CC.</p>
<p>I’m combining College Board data with reasonable assumptions. There are, for example, about 25 times more people who score 790-800 on Math Level 2 than who score 790-800 on Math Level 1. I doubt this is solely attributable to self-selection among the test-takers.</p>
<p>You are probably right. But assumptions, even reasonable ones, are troubling to rely on. Once, it was obvious and reasonable that the universe was static and fixed in size. :)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>In the absence of data, we have to make some in order to arrive at conclusions.</p>