Comment by JMStewy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JMStewy | Hacker News Reader

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I find myself very skeptical of your last claim. According to the research my friends and I did when taking the SATs, the difference between a 1570 or 1580 and 1600 was often a single question.

The scoring scale varied a bit based on the difficulty of the particular exam you sat, and as we were aiming for scores near the top of the scale we hoped to get an exam that allowed a question or two wrong to still get a 1600. Often one question wrong on verbal would still score 800, math was less forgiving of a single mistake.

I have trouble believing there could be any distinguishable difference in practice between the population of students who got two questions wrong on the exam and those who got one wrong.

There's fairly little difference between someone who gets two questions wrong on the exam and someone who got one wrong. There's usually a fairly large difference between someone who gets two wrong and someone who got them all right.

On the modern (post-1995) SAT, 1600 is a fairly wide range, from people who got 1-3 questions wrong to people who breezed through the whole test, double-checked everything, and didn't miss a single question. If you're talking to one of the latter, you'll know it.

You are right.

According to Wikipedia, SAT 1600 (post-1995) is 99.93 percentile, so about 1 in 1429 (3.4 standard deviations).

Given that there are millions of people taking SAT, in absolute numbers there should be plenty of people hitting the test ceiling.

Interestingly, pre-1995 apparently had much higher ceiling, with only 1 in 142,857 getting score above 1580 (4.6 standard deviations).

Which BTW means Microsoft was founded by some really crazy dudes.

Exactly. This is what Craig means when he says he got a perfect score when it meant perfect -- he got all the questions right.

For example, I took one of the SATs of that era (before antonyms were removed), missed only one question on the math section but still got a mere 770. I got over it.

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