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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.
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?
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?
I was a math major, and I don't find this suspect at all. Beyond 100-level courses, college math is primarily about logic, often applied to numbers, but also often applied to non-numbers. It would be entirely reasonable for a full semester of a class not to involve any engagement with numbers beyond the kind of basic everyday stuff, and explicit examples would be irrelevant, because those examples wouldn't involve numbers anyway. A majority of college-level math is writing essays.
However, on that note, I would say that I disagree with the notion that this would make math, or certain types of math, a verbal field. The fact that it's primarily about writing essays doesn't make it verbal, because the essays are based around rigorous rules of logic, which is what makes it a quant field, rather than a verbal field where such rules just don't matter.
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