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1460 SAT and rejected at Cornell has been trending on Twitter the last few days.
https://twitter.com/maiab/status/1736766407348814091?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
A lot of the takes were about him being rejected because he is white. The thing I find interesting is the condensing of the top 1-5% of scores into a smaller score range over time. My guess since the score differences look smaller it lets schools select more for other characteristics rather than pure mental horsepower. Getting a perfect score today or something that looks similar 1550 plus will not differentiate people as much.
Elon Musks apparently had a 1400 SAT. Bill Gates a 1590. Obviously they are both smart but I feel fairly confident Bill Gates is significantly higher pure IQ. With the way normal distributions operate I feel confident saying there is a big intelligence difference between the two but on the current system Musks would probably get 1580 and Gates 1600.
Digging thru SAT history there have been a few key years where the test had significant changes.
1993/1995 - some test changes but the big thing was a recentering to get scores back to about 1000 from 900. Before this update a median score at HYPS would have been 1370-1400 area. Bill Gates 1590 would have really stood out and guaranteed alone admittance to Harvard.
2005 - attempts to move the test closer to high school curriculum and eliminated analogies and quant comparisons. My guess is this made the test less of a pure intelligence test and closed gaps between highest performers and mid range.
2016 - more I guess dumbing down and trying to make the test more like what they did in high school. Multiple choice questions went from 5 options to 4 options and wrong answers no longer carried a penalty. This would make educated guessing far better.
Here is the current percentile for different scores.
https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-percentiles-and-score-rankings
1500 is now solidly top 2%. 1450 is top 4%.
Here is the data from 2003
https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-historical-percentiles-for-2005-2004-2003
1490-1600 was solidly differentiating between the top 1%.
I believe the new scoring significantly hurts the outliers at standing out from the test. And likely hurts the highest performing white, Asian, and Jewish males at getting into the most selective schools since the difference between a 1530 and 1600 SAT score just doesn’t seem that big statistically. It feels to me that studying for the new exam and learning test taking skills are more important today. Perhaps, you think this isn’t a big deal that the raw mental abilities of the top 1.2% and .3% of the population isn’t important and allowing schools to select more on other criteria is more important. My opinion for the very top programs finding the Bill Gates level intelligence matters. Men also have different intelligence bell curves (more people on the extremes) therefore on net I believe it hurts males.
I am also curious how someone who is really good at math could stand out in today’s environment. The SAT and a few good AP math scores wouldn’t seem to be enough. Do you need to have the opportunity to compete in high-end math tournaments?
Personally, the new testing I believe would have significantly effected my life. Coming from a lower class white family being able to crush the SAT gave me a way to stand out for a relatively cheap costs.
I am seeing a median SAT score of 1520 at Harvard and a median of 1440 at UMICH. My guess is back in the day that gap was much higher.
Harvard mostly boils down your smartness into their Academics rating as described here:
Near-perfect test scores and grades will only ever get you the second-highest rating. I remember when I was looking at colleges 10 years ago that I noted that Brown only admitted ~25% of people with perfect ACT scores.
When you combine this with now-public data on Harvard's admissions, it becomes pretty clear that, with no change to the ACT/SAT, Harvard could pretty straightforwardly choose the next incoming class to have an average IQ of at least half a standard deviation higher than previous classes.
I think that's the rub: even if the ACT/SAT were redesigned to better discriminate among the top of the distribution, Harvard et al's current behavior makes me pretty skeptical that this would result in smarter people being admitted.
That being said, if you have amazing test scores and grades, you should probably really consider Caltech - they're have no legacy or affirmative action, and they place a huge emphasis on those exact factors.
This is neither here-nor-there, but there is good evidence that top schools under-weigh test scores if their goal is to predict who will be most successful. Who knows to what extent this is because (a) intelligence is super important at accomplishing things or (b) nearly all selective institutions [edit: including med school, law school, FAANG companies, consulting firms, etc] use intelligence filters since they're easy to evaluate - for instance, grit is hard to figure out in a test or interview.
Does cal tech still do this? I had heard that they had jumped on the social justice wagon and weren’t even excepting standardized testing scores for a while.
I’m actually having a hard time finding any concrete documentation from the last year. However, the Asian:Black ratio at Caltech is 10. At MIT it’s 4.4; at Harvard it’s 2.4; at Stanford it’s 3.5. So, at the very least it’s far lower in practice.
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I think this is it. They not only want smart students, but those who have potential to be leaders of industries, law, politics, etc. that will bring donations and repute. But interestingly, purely selecting for merit does optimize for donations though. MIT's endowment is also very big, about half that of Harvard, and bigger than Harvard on a per-student basis. High-IQ hedge fund managers and CEOs donate a lot.
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