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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.
I will take a stand here: if they are under the impression that a 1460 SAT on its own is impressive enough that it is notable that it did not get them into Cornell, they are not an ivy league caliber student. Just flatly, they do not understand the system.
-- A 1460 SAT isn't really that impressive. It's just...not that big a deal. Even looking at the medians at schools isn't enough, because most of the students at those schools will have a whole pile of other stuff in their resume. Good High School GPA, good extracurriculars, good essays. Any given student might have lacking extracurriculars, a weak GPA, or have written a meandering poorly reasoned essay about how superior he thinks he is to the hoi polloi. He might have put down Stormfront Juniors as his extracurricular and written his essay about his admiration for Rudolf Hess. You just don't know.
-- Admissions are pretty random anyway. Any individual student getting rejected from any individual school isn't notable. At all. Personal story: I applied to all the T14 law schools. I only got into one, waitlisted at the rest. That one offered me a full tuition scholarship. Which makes no sense, because I didn't even get into the schools they were trying to buy me out of. My point being not only was my admissions result random, the admissions team at my school (who presumably know a lot about that kind of thing) didn't expect that result and tried to bribe me not to go to the schools that didn't admit me. Further, HYS all waitlisted me, effectively indicating that I was marginal as a candidate but on balance I was "good enough" for HYS, I was of the caliber of student they were looking for. Georgetown flat rejected me! Georgetown! You never know where you will or won't be admitted on an individual basis, at best it's a probability.
-- Not knowing the above indicates to me that the people involved aren't plugged into the gunner universe of students who put together Ivy League resumes in high school, and therefore probably didn't put together an ivy league caliber resume, and therefore didn't "deserve" to get in. Whether that is the system we want is irrelevant, it's the system we have. It's not about being white, it's about not being a gunner.
I didn’t apply to all T14 but applied to 12/14. Was accepted at one; waitlisted at pretty much all of them. It is to a certain extent yield protection. I focused on the Chicago - Columbia - NYU tier (or at least the tier at the time — I understand USN heavily changed their rankings recently) to get off the waitlist as those appeared to be reasonably the most likely schools I could get into given my grades / LSAT. You generally have a good shot of getting off waitlists if you show you are really interested in that school and ultimately I had success with that.
This is what you would expect. Let's assume among qualified applicants (qualified as in good grades, scores, etc.) the odds of getting in is 10%. So if you apply to 14, you have a 77% chance of getting into at least one.
It's what you expect if the result is essentially random, or contains a random element.
That's not how most people view it, most assume that it's like lifting weights. If one can press 225 there's a 100% chance one can press 205, and a near 100% chance one can squat 225. People broadly view college admin that way, if you get into 15 you definitely get into 20 etc.
College admissions are really more like dating: you might be hot or you might not be, and that helps your odds, but you can never look at a girl and say "x guy should definitely fall in love with you." You can say it's odd if a hot girl can't get any dates at all, but even then it often has something to do with her. If many hot girls can't get dates, you can say something about the system, but nothing about individual girls or boys.
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IMO I am not sure how much the kid in question blew this up. I think someone else just claimed it and it got trending. So he may have known he was a reach.
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