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Comment by IMAYousaf | Hacker News Reader

Hi. Yes. The only section I did not get a perfect on was writing. I missed 1 of the multiple choice questions. I always believed that the grammar choices offered were a bit dubious but it is what it is. Totally possible and probably likely that I just got some grammar rule wrong, though I’d like to think that the test was wrong :)

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Am I misremembering how the test is scored? My recollection was that score == writing score + math score + verbal score, with each section being worth 800. If you only missed a question on the writing, shouldn't your score have been at least 2300, and your 1600 scale score would have been 1600?

I believe so. The curve on the test, if that is the right word here, is a bit random. Sometimes one could miss 2 or 3 questions and still have an 800. My Math and Verbal Scores were 800 each. The one question I missed in Writing gave me a 790 out of 800, but in reality it was 590 out of the 600 allocated towards the multiple choice questions, with the "optional" writing section weighing in for the other 200 points. This is a gross oversimplification and could be totally wrong but that was what my score was.

Yes, I understand that, but that still doesn't seem to add up right to me. You seem to have gotten a perfect score on the optional writing section, so let's just ignore that since it would only increase your overall score. Your score was 800+800+590 out of 800+800+800, which is 2190/2200. Just applying the same ratio to 1600 gets 1592 on the 1600 scale. If I adjust for the fact that the 1600 scale is really "the same math test and writing+verbal combined into one score), I get 800 + (1390/1400)*800 = 1594. Right?

I know this isn't important, I'm just trying to understand where my math is breaking down.

I don't think that everything scales 1:1.

I took this from the College Board website:

"Your raw score is converted to a scaled score of 200 to 800 points, the score you see on your score report. We use a process that adjusts for slight differences in difficulty between various versions of the test (such as versions taken on different days).

We do this to make sure there’s no advantage in taking the test on a particular day. A score of 400, for instance, on one day’s test means the same thing as a 400 on a test taken on a different day—even though the questions are different."

https://collegereadiness.collegeboard.org/sat/scores/how-sat...

I definitely remember that it's scored, it's just really hard for me to imagine getting a single question wrong and having your overall score go down by over 100 points (almost 7%).

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