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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).
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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