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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.
The core problem with the SAT is that it’s much more common to get high scores on the math section than the verbal section.
780-800 on math is like 97-99th percentile, some places online suggest you need a perfect 800 for 99th percentile. Meanwhile you can hit like 755 or 760 on verbal and that’s 99th percentile for that section. For the most elite colleges, this essentially means that verbal scores matter much more at the ultra high end, and colleges know this. Someone with a 1500 composite score is almost always just another kid with a perfect or near perfect math section and good verbal. Someone with a 1600 is someone with truly exceptional verbal IQ.
The problem lies in inherent issues with spatial IQ as measured by math questions. The SAT math section can’t have math that every high schooler doesn’t know for reasons of fairness. This aside, even adding harder math questions would measure math knowledge as much as pure IQ (a lot of AP math is methods anyway). Raven’s matrices and literal shape rotation problems solve this - the idea is immediately obvious and they can scale in difficulty to pretty insane levels - but that would drop the act about the SAT not being a pure IQ test.
(If you believe theories of group-level verbal tilt, this arguably gives Jews a minor ‘unfair’ advantage for elite college admissions because smart Jews, per that theory, would be more likely to have great verbal and merely good quant scores than other groups with more even ability; it’s pretty unproven though afaik).
That's a good point about the math section being easier, because it definitely is (at least for the super high levels). But isn't the verbal section skewed towards native speakers with native-speaker parents? how the heck is someone who immigrated as a teenager, with non-English speaking parents, ever supposed to do well on the verbal section no matter how smart he is? It's not like they offer a Chinese language version of the SAT. (there is the AP Chinese test, which is something I guess)
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Why is the verbal section so much more heavily g-loaded? Does it contain logic puzzles or something? I have never taken an sat (and took the act decades ago)
It's just that they chose easier math problems.
Some of the verbal sections are relatively difficult interpretive questions, with subtle reasons why one of the answers was right, and the other wrong.
I did about equally well between math and verbal on both the SAT and PSAT, but verbal always felt like it had several questions that I was not certain between two of the choices and going with the answer that felt slightly more likely than the other, whereas the math I always knew what I was doing, had no problems working anything out and just occasionally made stupid mistakes.
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The SAT has significant clipping, particularly for math (though math scores and verbal scores are correlated; scaling the verbal score would give you a meaningful signal of math capabilities >800). You could add harder questions and get a more meaningful metric, and these questions aren't particularly difficult to construct, even ignoring exposure to advanced math topics in school. The issue is that elite universities don't want a bunch of exceptional shape rotators: they want to provide a reproduction ground for the elite, who need to be smart but not potential Von Neumanns.
There is no problem with the SATs, institutionally: they give universities what they want.
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A lot of this feels like the idea that the left holds all the institutional power. They recreated the SAT to make it hard for math people to stand out but verbal to be the big separator. It also seems like the new test favors females versus boys. The changes overall seem to be better for blue tribe versus red tribe. It may only be a small shift but it’s another advantage they have built into the system.
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I understand that its not straightforward to write difficult math questions that do not require any advanced knowledge but with how easy the SAT/ACT math sections are it feels like they're not even trying. The AMC/AIME contain multiple questions each year that require no special knowledge and are harder than the hardest question on the SAT. Here's one nice example https://artofproblemsolving.com/wiki/index.php/1985_AIME_Problems/Problem_6 solving it requires no knowledge beyond area of a triangle = 1/2 base * height and basic equation solving but I bet many 800 math scorers would still struggle, especially with time pressure.
Questions with combinatorics and counting are highly g loaded because you need to know the 'trick' or shortcut , which involves certain symmetries or patterns, instead of brute forcing it , but at the same time the actual math is not conceptually advanced.
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For what it's worth, I always chalked the far higher variance in the verbal section to the fact that math questions (almost always) have exactly one correct answer, while the verbal section plays a lot more into social expectations of how you interpret texts and questions, and doesn't quantify well.
I scored pretty well, but not 800, on verbal (and like many, higher on math) and felt that many of the multiple-choice questions had ambiguous answers in which at least two could be, arguably -- and I probably could have written a few paragraphs of justification -- interpreted as correct. I'm not going to claim that I deserved a higher score, but at some level it felt like the meta-game was determining which answer a College Board test writer would interpret as correct.
Absolutely; this was the bane of my existance when I was in my standardised testing years. With the quant sections I knew how well I had done pretty much as soon as I had checked over my answers during the test itself, with the verbal section there was always a lot more inherent variance based on which option was the supposedly "correct" one.
That just means you’re not as good at verbal though. I very consistently do extremely well on verbal sections and there are people who can consistently hit 800 on the SAT’s variant. They’re not inconsistent and there is pretty much always an obvious best answer. And I never studied examiner dictionaries or grading guidelines, it’s not scrabble or a spelling bee.
I think it's trickier than that, though. I've got this fairly strong memory of a multiple choice verbal question along the lines of
'How does Alcohol impact driving skills
A) Strongly negatively B) Negatively C) Significantly Negatively D) Positively '
Where I'm sure they wanted the exact wording of the pamphlet in hindsight, but it's also somewhat absurd to mark any of A-C as incorrect.
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Fair enough, I definitely agree I'm less good at verbal compared to quant. The other thing that always ground my gears was the fact that we got more time per question on the quant section compared to the verbal section, they were giving 1:15 or so per quant question and like 0:50 per verbal question, even though the quant sections were stuff you could spit out answers to in 0:30 while the verbal stuff often required reading a passage, which used up the 0:50 you had per question.
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Where does that theory come from anyway? Jews are clearly way overrepresented in high quant ability too. Are they all that skewed toward being wordcels?
Jews are extremely overrepresented in both, but there’s some evidence of relatively higher representation in verbal fields, eg. Jews are overrepresented by 700% among math professors but 1300% among law professors. As with any Kierkegaard theory it’s highly questionable and shouldn’t be taken as fact.
Some have argued, separately, that physics is really more of a hybrid or perhaps even primarily verbal field than a quant field.
Couldn't that have to do with network effects counting for more in Verbal pursuits, since it's less objective who the 'best' law professor is whilst mathematics can be tangibly measured far more easily?
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But physics is applied math. Theoretical physics is not uncommonly on forefront of math or indistinguishable from pure maths.
You might say that some pure maths is also a verbal field, I've taken semester long courses in pure mathematics where there was not a single number at any point (other than 0 or 1, but even then they didn't represent the numbers 0 and 1 as commonly used).
No indexed sequences, even? Was it all category theory?
Always has been.
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Ah, there were indexed sequences, you are right about that. It was a highly complex Abstract Algebra course, but there were sequences of Ideals.
Maybe I should change my claim to "did not use numbers for any purpose beyond kindergarten counting".
Still sounds suspect. No explicit examples worked out all semester?
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I think part of the issue is that a verbal/spatial split is not the same as a verbal/quantitative split. Something like theoretical math or physics might actually be more verbal than it is spatial even though it falls on the quant side of the verbal/quant split.
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