Spoliers (it's very long): he got one question correct, sadly.<p>I feel for him given the preparation and detail he put into it. I missed a few SAT questions my senior year but helpfully, The College Board decided to make the test easier the following year and magically recalibrate my scores to perfect. It was too late for colleges to care and the expected thousand girlfriends never materialized but it did make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.
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.
A lot of the SAT-apologist comments here missed one of the most amazing parts of the post:<p>> "The correlation between [...] combined verbal and math scores and freshman GPA is .52;"<p>.52! And it's pulled <i>straight from the College Board's Terms and Conditions!</i> 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 correlation is both hilarious and horrifying.
I admit, I didn't read the whole thing, it was super long.<p>I personally think the ACT (and by association the SAT) is a better measure of intelligence than a GPA, and I would love it if companies used that more often as a filtering metric. Obviously, grades in general aren't the best metric, but they're simple and generally pretty reliable.<p>If I were hiring somebody, I'd look at a combination of test scores and personal achievements. If I were hiring a programmer, I'd filter by test scores, then look at examples of projects the applicant works on/is associated with. Grades aren't as important in my opinion.<p>If that's the premise of the post, I totally agree. If not, I'm not willing to read a forever long post that forces me to relive the horror of the testing I went through before I got into college.
This reminds of me playing Hearts on a PC. You can try really hard to get a good score, or you can get the worst score possible and win the round[1]. I didn't read the whole article, but it was pretty clear that to get the lowest possible score you have to know the correct response to every question. (A little less black & white for the essay section, but you get the gist.)<p>Colleges should have a lottery admission available to people who <i>can</i> get a perfect score on the SAT/ACT. Students would inadvertently study harder and learn proportionally more than if they were to study hard enough to get a perfect score.<p>[1] <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts#Shooting_the_moon" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearts#Shooting_the_moon</a>
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 you want (much better margin for error).
I had to laugh when reading about the Fantasy "Calculators" - included as a fantasy is a "Slide Rule" - when I took my grade 12 physics provincial finals in 1987, I didn't have a calculator with me, but that was not unexpected, so students were also provided with a booklet of log tables - a predecessor, of course, to the slide rule.<p>The log tables, of course, were more than sufficient for whatever complex multiplication and division that had to be done.
Mostly off topic, but do USA schoolschildren get taught to use things like "number of degrees of arc", "measures in degrees" and "inverse logarithm" instead of just "degrees" and "exponentiation"/"exponential" (and the use of the last one is the geometric mean, which is a much pithier explanation and concept).<p>And, a correlation of .52 isn't the same as a coin toss: that would be a correlation of 0.
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.
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 literature of psychology, with the warrant of studies specifically on that issue. Note that it is standard usage among psychologists to treat "general intelligence" as a term that basically equates with "scoring well on IQ tests and good proxies of IQ tests," which is the point of some of the comments here.<p><a href="http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/koening2008.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/koening2008.pdf</a><p>"Frey and Detterman (2004) showed that the SAT was correlated with measures of general intelligence .82 (.87 when corrected for nonlinearity)"<p><a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144549/" rel="nofollow">http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3144549/</a><p>"Indeed, research suggests that SAT scores load highly on the first principal factor of a factor analysis of cognitive measures; a finding that strongly suggests that the SAT is g loaded (Frey & Detterman, 2004)."<p><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-sats-matter/the-sat-is-a-good-intelligence-test" rel="nofollow">http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/12/04/why-should-s...</a><p>"Furthermore, the SAT is largely a measure of general intelligence. Scores on the SAT correlate very highly with scores on standardized tests of intelligence, and like IQ scores, are stable across time and not easily increased through training, coaching or practice."<p><a href="http://faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/peters/lab/pubs/publications/2012_Peters_Beyond_comprehension_The_role_of_numeracy_in_J_and_D.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://faculty.psy.ohio-state.edu/peters/lab/pubs/publicatio...</a><p>"Numeracy’s effects can be examined when controlling for other proxies of general intelligence (e.g., SAT scores; Stanovich & West, 2008)."<p>As I have heard the issue discussed in the local "journal club" I participate in with professors and graduate students of psychology who focus on human behavioral genetics (including the genetics of IQ), one thing that makes the SAT a very good proxy of general intelligence is that its item content is disclosed (in released previous tests that can be used as practice tests), so that almost the only difference between one test-taker and another in performance on the SAT is generally and consistently getting all of the various items correct, which certainly takes cognitive strengths.<p>Psychologist Keith R. Stanovich makes the interesting point that there are very strong correlations with IQ scores and SAT scores with some of what everyone regards as "smart" behavior (and which psychologists by convention call "general intelligence") while there are still other kinds of tests that plainly have indisputable right answers that high-IQ people are able to muff. Thus Stanovich distinguishes "intelligence" (essentially, IQ) from "rationality" (making correct decisions that overcome human cognitive biases) as distinct aspects of human cognition. He has a whole book on the subject, What Intelligence Tests Miss, that is quite thought-provoking and informative.<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psychology/dp/0300164629/" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/What-Intelligence-Tests-Miss-Psycholog...</a><p>(Disclosure: I enjoy this kind of research discussion partly because I am acquainted with one large group of high-IQ young people<p><a href="http://cty.jhu.edu/set/" rel="nofollow">http://cty.jhu.edu/set/</a><p>and am interested in how such young people develop over the course of life.)
Instead of points for correct answers the result of the test should be defined as probability of such set of responses to be achieved by chance only. :-)
My high school required students to take the ASVAB in addition to the ACT (SAT wasn't offered, so I had to go to a testing center for it).<p>I know a guy who honestly tried on the math section. He got the single point for signing his name, but missed all the questions. The first question is "2+2".
I have done this before on high school and college exams (not the SAT unfortunately), along with other similar experiments like writing answers backwards, using red pen to write my answers to muddle grading attempts, and writing essays on completely different subjects than the one assigned. The level of disbelief expressed by peers and teachers when you challenge their value system led to perhaps one of the most important lessons I learned in my time spent locked in the school system. Thinking outside the box means you are still stuck in a box.
>Scores on the SAT correlate very highly with scores on standardized tests of intelligence, and like IQ scores, are stable across time and not easily increased through training, coaching or practice.<p>That is interesting.How would you account for the fact that i increased my score by 130 points upon a retake without the help of a tutor(Too bad my new score was useless since i already had a fullride)?These tests can be gamed.Heck ,even iQ scores arent stable over a lifetime if anyone has bothered to read current research(Fynn Effect blah blah)
Tangentially related, on one of my (national) highschool math finals, I decided to bring an abacus instead of a calculator. The proctor gave me a weird look, I explained I was using it as a calculator, and he gave me no problems.
While reading this, I slowly started to tune out and pressed the back button after realizing just how much material was on the page.<p>I realized that this must be what my friends go through when I explain stuff I'm interested in.<p>Ouch.
For anyone wondering what is meant by the "12700-choice" questions mentioned starting in section 5.1, they are the questions in the "student-produced response" format analyzed in section 8.
Collin Fahey has won the internet today in my book. Every single thing he wrote had amazing attention to detail and in many cases was charged with extra meaning. Genius.
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.<p>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.