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SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

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Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#31

Post by spicyj »

imjk wrote: post #28

Isn't it considerably easier to get every question wrong than it would be to get a perfect score (every question right)? For each question, there is only one correct answer but four incorrect ones. If you're aiming for a perfect score, you have to choose the only one correct answer among the five choices. But if you're trying to get every question wrong, you can choose one of four different answers to get the outcome…

That would be true, but you are in fact allowed to miss a couple of questions and still get a perfect score.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#32

Post by Serplat »

spicyj wrote: post #31
imjk wrote: post #28

Isn't it considerably easier to get every question wrong than it would be to get a perfect score (every question right)? For each question, there is only one correct answer but four incorrect ones. If you're aiming for a perfect score, you have to choose the only one correct answer among the five choices. But if you're trying to get every question wrong, you can choose one of four different answers to get the outcome…

That would be true, but you are in fact allowed to miss a couple of questions and still get a perfect score.

That depends on the section of the test. Critical reading you can get several wrong, writing depends on your essay score, and math you typically can't get any wrong.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#33

Post by zheng »

This is possibly the funniest thing I have read this year. As an aside, the amount of thought and focus this guy obviously can devote to a single topic is amazing. I really hope someone is paying him lots of money (or whatever he prefers) to use his talents for good.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#34

Post by imjk »

tokenadult wrote: post #19

A lot of the comments here are related to the idea of whether or not the SAT can be regarded as being much like an IQ test. It can, and psychologists routinely think of the SAT that way. Despite a number of statements to the contrary in the various comments here, taking SAT scores as an informative correlate (proxy) of what psychologists call "general intelligence" is a procedure often found in the professional liter…

How do you reconcile the large leaps in SAT scores that people achieve through preparing for the test? For example, while I had a fairly respectable score in high school, after I spent a little time working as an SAT tutor in college, I was regularly scoring perfectly on all practice tests and recently release new tests. Surely my IQ hadn't jumped drastically. Just curious for your take on this.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#35

Post by ekm2 »

Isnt amazing that at the time you apply to Harvard,Yale and other top schools,admission officials brag at just how many perfect SAT scorers they have turned down,yet a few years down the line turn back and claim to have sifted out the best and the brightest and gladly hint at scores as the measure of brilliance.I even remember reading an article about Harvard adcoms pointing out how they do not want to turn their school into an Ecole Nomale Superieure .Either they lie about inputs or the outputs.They cant have it both ways.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#36

Post by nitrogen »

ComputerGuru wrote: post #5
maeon3 wrote: post #3

The SAT is an important measure of a humans intelligence and performance in the real world, that's why the best companies always filter candidates and select the ones with highest SAT scores. It's a good thing we have tests like these and pay large sums of money to the people who maintain it. Otherwise interviewing might be totally screwed up and completely fail at its intended purpose in this country.

Yes, it's clear (to me at any rate) that you're being sarcastic. But, speaking as someone who once was a SAT taker and now is in a position to hire people based on their SAT scores, your sarcasm is unwarranted and you're looking at the SAT in an incorrect light: the SAT, all things considered, does reflect something . It's not a random number the College Board pulls out of their backside. At the end of the day, havin…

...teachers don't want standardized tests to be used as metrics to determine the quality of their teaching, and they wanted to set the evaluations themselves.

There's a very good reason for good teachers to push back against evaluations based on standardized testing, and that's the fact that they can be assigned bad students to force them out of their jobs. When two equally qualified teachers at the same school teach the same subjects, and one of them plays the administration's political games and the other does not, you may mysteriously find that the second teacher's class sizes are larger, and that they got all the known troublemakers.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#37

Post by andylei »

imjk wrote: post #34
tokenadult wrote: post #19

A lot of the comments here are related to the idea of whether or not the SAT can be regarded as being much like an IQ test. It can, and psychologists routinely think of the SAT that way. Despite a number of statements to the contrary in the various comments here, taking SAT scores as an informative correlate (proxy) of what psychologists call "general intelligence" is a procedure often found in the professional liter…

How do you reconcile the large leaps in SAT scores that people achieve through preparing for the test? For example, while I had a fairly respectable score in high school, after I spent a little time working as an SAT tutor in college, I was regularly scoring perfectly on all practice tests and recently release new tests. Surely my IQ hadn't jumped drastically. Just curious for your take on this.

correlations are aggregate data measures that are only meaningful on large datasets. a high score on the SAT for one person does not imply that that person is smart. it just means that if you had a large population of people and you wanted to predict their intelligence, you could use SAT scores and get pretty good results.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#38

Post by tankbot »

imjk wrote: post #34
tokenadult wrote: post #19

A lot of the comments here are related to the idea of whether or not the SAT can be regarded as being much like an IQ test. It can, and psychologists routinely think of the SAT that way. Despite a number of statements to the contrary in the various comments here, taking SAT scores as an informative correlate (proxy) of what psychologists call "general intelligence" is a procedure often found in the professional liter…

How do you reconcile the large leaps in SAT scores that people achieve through preparing for the test? For example, while I had a fairly respectable score in high school, after I spent a little time working as an SAT tutor in college, I was regularly scoring perfectly on all practice tests and recently release new tests. Surely my IQ hadn't jumped drastically. Just curious for your take on this.

You don't reconcile. Tests of any kind have this problem as intelligence is not quantifiable, only knowledge and age. The GP is merely showing that the SATs are referenced as IQ tests. Since the same argument applies to IQ tests, even in this respect they are similar.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#39

Post by jlgreco »

tokenadult wrote: post #19

A lot of the comments here are related to the idea of whether or not the SAT can be regarded as being much like an IQ test. It can, and psychologists routinely think of the SAT that way. Despite a number of statements to the contrary in the various comments here, taking SAT scores as an informative correlate (proxy) of what psychologists call "general intelligence" is a procedure often found in the professional liter…

Has the SAT been found to have a disparate impact on protected minorities, like other "IQ" tests have been? I know employers usually consider any sort of "IQ test" in America to be legally risky for discrimination reasons; I wonder if Universities could face similar issues.

A lot of those things, particularly the reading comprehension sections, seem like they could be heavily influenced by culture.

Re: SAT: Getting the lowest score possible

#40

Post by brianchu »

tzs wrote: post #25
nateberkopec wrote: post #16

A lot of the SAT-apologist comments here missed one of the most amazing parts of the post: > "The correlation between [...] combined verbal and math scores and freshman GPA is .52;" .52! And it's pulled straight from the College Board's Terms and Conditions! And later on, it goes on to explain that high school GPA's correlation is just .54! The graph he produced to visualize the scatter involved with a .52 correlatio…

Ideally, shouldn't there be weak or no correlation between score and college grades, when your sample is all SAT takers? My reasoning (not entirely non-serious) is that people who score high on the SAT get into hard schools and so get their GPA smacked down to average, whereas those with poor SAT scores get into easy schools where they can earn an average GPA.

The problem with that line of reasoning is that GPA is a relative measure - your GPA tells people (theoretically) how you stack up against your classmates - the concept of grading classes on a "curve." Furthermore, there is a correlation between grade inflation and both the selectivity of a school and whether a school is private, with private schools exhibiting more grade inflation (http://gradeinflation.com).
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