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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.
Why did the US end up with this system? In Canada, there is no equivalent to the SAT. To apply to university, you usually just submit a high school transcript.
If you want a full scholarship, that's another story, but you will usually get something just for having good grades and the tuition is less than half what it would be at a state school in the US.
We also don't have anything like the Ivy league. Our top universities have huge student bodies, and the gap between them and the lower ranked universities is not as big. The university of Toronto has 76,000 undergraduate students. Nor do we have the same problem with grade inflation. U of T notoriously grades its undergrads in a curve, which is not popular for students who all excelled academically in high school. Other schools, such as my alma mater don't do this, but it's common for courses to have C averages (which are stated on the transcript). Does it have something to do with the US having private universities?
The result is that, unlike the US, the UK, China, and probably many other countries, it's not so difficult to get into a good university, but it's hard to do well once you're in, and depending on the program, hard to even pass. But in these other countries where it's really hard to get into the top universities, once you're in, you don't have to work very hard from what I've heard.
I assume it has a lot to do with the private universities, I mean Berkeley is basically a public ivy and they have 45k students.
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The US has 50 different education systems and each of those systems is subject to 3,200 systems of local oversight and quality control. That means a diploma means very, very different things across the 25,000 different high schools in the nation. A national university can never wrap enough factors to adjust for what a given class rank means from each school.
A national standardized test provides a sanity check/talent screen.
We have state-wide standardized tests, and almost every high school's average score is public knowledge. Graduation rates are also typically a matter of public record. So, it should be pretty easy for a college to know how impressive a diploma (or specific rank) is from a given school.
No idea if college admissions people do this ¯_(ツ)_/¯
Edit: Idk why you think a national test would add much more value over state tests. There are plenty of proxies you could use to compute average state-smartness
school_smartness = avg_state_smartness + school_smartness_on_state_tests
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And this is feasible for a country of 40 million but not for one of 330 million? Because I think universities in Canada do exactly that. They adjust grades based on the specific high school. A standardized test would help with this. We even have provincial standardized math exams that every grade 12 math student takes, but I've never heard of a university asking for students' results on this test.
Canada's universities draw far more provincial students than similar US universities. McGill gets 47% of it's student body from Quebec where the Frasier institute ranks 468 high schools (with more than 10 students).
Harvard has only 15% of it's student body from any state and they pull from almost all states.
If Harvard and other top US universities were mostly regional schools, a national assessment would likely be unnecessary in the US, because the admissions officers would know the 2500 schools in their region well and they'd only take top students from other regions, but because most US universities are trying to pull the best student body they can from as broad a geographic brush as they possibly can a national standardized test makes things far easier.
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As per usual, capitalism. These are all private companies with high profits, including entire ancillary markets for practice tests and tutoring and cram schools and etc.
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It helps that the stakes tend to be much lower. Lower paying jobs, less winner-take-all, fewer billion-dollar tech start-ups, no hedge funds, etc. Reduce the returns to elite education and you consequently reduce the competition too. More competition means you need more testing to differentiate applicants. Overseas, there is a lot of competition despite the economies being weaker than the US, but it's implied that top-scorers who get admitted to top universities, like in India, China, etc. will be able to land good-paying jobs in the US.
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I’ve been thinking about a related question.
Germany certainly has universities of varying prestige, but they don’t vary nearly as much as the gap between the average mediocre college and Stanford, and the best at undergraduate level are also often very large. In several European countries (Italy is another example) course entry thresholds are pretty modest, but the first year gauntlet is extremely hard.
But in all of them - even where there are large gaps in prestige, like in the UK - the boarding school feel of most elite American colleges just isn’t a thing. Even at Oxford, as I understand it. The whole nature of the private liberal arts school is designed to increase the value of elite colleges. You could go to Cambridge or Heidelberg and never encounter the ruling class of that country except maybe very vaguely in passing. Classes are often very large, social circles small, and the few hours you spend a week in education are dwarfed by the rest of life in which all the usual divisions exist. There may be tutorials but hours per week are still much lower than in American colleges. The few elite US colleges that are actual ‘city universities’ (Columbia is probably the best example) are also somewhat like this.
If you go to Harvard or Stanford at undergrad you’re going to meet the kids of the American ruling class. Yeah you’re not going to be best buddies and people still stick to their own kind but it’s an order of magnitude more than in Europe.
Can confirm. I met a shit ton of people far smarter than I could ever be, but the vast vast majority of them were less "elite" than me, in fact, because of my schooling background and family station back home, I was the "child of elites" person in most of my groups (fat load of good it did me though).
I met plenty of people who had studied at Eton and Harrow and Westminster etc. but even they by and large behaved little different from ordinary people (and most of them were sons and daughters of parents who had saved up to give their child a good education rather than anything more); sure the conservative association held their yearly dinner in a grand room at the houses of parliment (with price tag to boot) but the afterparty was a trip to the nightclub where everyone would slum it out with the common populace of London.
To be honest with you I was negatively surprised by how vulgar (used in the original sense of the word) all of it seemed to be, when I matriculated I expected things to be a lot more rarified than they actually were once you stripped away the institutional traditions.
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