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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023

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1460 SAT

This really isn't very impressive. Looks like a Verbal 660 and a Math 800 (or close enough), anyone who takes even a cursory interest in reading/writing in the English language and isn't failing at mathematics should be able to match it. If it was 1560 maybe this dude would have a point, with his current scores it looks like he just got filtered due to there being better candidates.

Looks like a Verbal 660 and a Math 800 (or close enough), anyone who takes even a cursory interest in reading/writing in the English language and isn't failing at mathematics should be able to match it.

That's absurd. A 660 in English is 87th percentile. An 800 in Math is 98th percentile. And that's from the population of students who bothered to take the SAT, not from the general population. 98% of students are sure as fuck not passing algebra. More than 13% of college-bound seniors have taken a passing interest in reading and writing.

I agree that a 1460 SAT is not very impressive for an Ivy League application if you are white, though it's above the average for black students accepted to Harvard. But it's still a WAY above average score. It's just not enough to stand out when you are applying to the most competitive schools in a country of 300 million people.

This thread is super funny to me because I got a 1460 and went to community college and then a decent state school from which I went right into the workforce and never graduated.

I was a decent student, 3.5 GPA, took no sat prep.

I got a perfect score on the Verbal portion which does give me a twinge of pride.

Depending on the IQ scale I’m in or around the 99th percentile, but I had a bunch of other issues which hobbled my academic performance.

Learning not to mix up my sense of self worth with my academic performance or intellectual ability was an important aspect of reaching maturity in my young adulthood, and I’m now very happily living a working class-ish lifestyle far away from the influence of the PMC peer group I had in university.

Although my high intelligence is usually the most obvious attribute people notice upon meeting me, I don’t even think it’s near the top of my best qualities.

I’m not even sure it’s all that important in isolation anymore, only as a support to other good qualities a person can have.

Yes, and all US colleges weight against math and in favor of verbal scores because perfect math scores are so much more common.

Look at the GMAT. Tons of Indians and Chinese hit perfect scores on the quant section (50/51 is like 85th percentile, a perfect 51 is barely 95th percentile). Meanwhile, even 45/51 on the verbal section is 99th percentile.

So the GMAT - at the top level - is essentially a verbal IQ competition and HSW etc will even let you drop a few points on quant if you have an extremely impressive verbal score.

Tons of Indians and Chinese hit perfect scores on the quant section (50/51 is like 85th percentile, a perfect 51 is barely 95th percentile). Meanwhile, even 45/51 on the verbal section is 99th percentile.

I honestly think this is bad test design though. The scaled scores should correspond to roughly the same percentiles for both quant and verbal, doing otherwise just means the same score on Quant vs Verbal doesn't mean the same thing in relation to your peers also applying for the same programs, e.g. currently a 48/51 verbal is amazing, while a 48/51 quant is very meh.

It's not like this is hard to fix, if necessary you can just increase the number of questions on the quant section while keeping the same time limit for the sections, that way you can tell the super good quant people from the merely good quant people (the former will solve questions faster, so get more of them done in the allotted time) while right now basically everyone with a command of the materials gets close to full marks and you can't distinguish the "amazing" from the "merely very good".

I'm glad I never had to do the GMAT, I think I'd do well but it's just ugh, like why...

Does the relationship between problem solving speed and g scale infinitely? Can you really just take a dozen easy matrices, give everyone 4 minutes and get the same ranking as if you take a bunch of hard problems and give the same people a couple hours to do them? I’m skeptical.

I guess it seems likely they’ve considered that solution.

Does the relationship between problem solving speed and g scale infinitely

Probably not infinitely, but it probably scales farther than the current tests are pushing it. I remember when i took the SAT I thought they gave you way too much time on the math section. I finished every question and double checked all my answers in less than half the time allotted so i just put my head down at that point.

Fair enough, it doesn't scale infinitely but it does a lot, and it definitely scales in the region where SAT/GMAT tops out.

See e.g. the Wonderlic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderlic_test which is just 50 easy questions that any IQ 100 person should be able to solve given unlimited time, the catch is that you just have 8 minutes for everything, and so the average score is 20/50, making it effectively a test of speed on "easy" questions. All the evidence I've seen is that high wonderlic scores are very highly correlated to high IQ scores as done with a certified test like WAIS, and this correlation doesn't disappear even close to the 50/50 upper limit.

Yes, that’s a good example. I’d be interested to see how efforts to raise the ceiling for the quant GMAT section would pan out.