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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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