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Comment by retskrad | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of these standardised tests, I think it's ridiculous that even for someone like Elon Musk, who read for up to 10 hours a day for most of his of pre college days and learned how to build rockets with the use of books och instruction manuals, only scored 730 on the Math section and 670 on the Verbal section for a total composite score of 1400. The fact that he couldn't get higher score means something is wrong with these tests. They are mirroring a very narrow frequency of aptitude.

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> The fact that he couldn't get higher score means something is wrong with these tests.

Does it? As others pointed out, those aren't bad scores. Not the highest scores, but not embarrassing for a better student.

It could be that his claimed reading time is just that, a claim, and not true. Or the material he was reading wasn't challenging in a way that would help with test prep to get him a higher score.

I was going to say, you can study 10 hours a day on topics that you like or find valuable and not cover all the material for the test. I took the SAT as a junior and didn't really study for it, so I hadn't covered some of the math types yet. I still did fine and got into all the colleges I applied to. It really only seems to matter if you want to go to a prestigious school.

> only scored 730 on the Math section and 670 on the Verbal section for a total composite score of 1400.

Those numbers are well above average. Good results. I don't know the context but if he didn't prepare much or at all then those results are quite good.

If you expected him to get a perfect score, your expectations might be too high or there might be some hero worship going on.

Been a very, very long time. But I expect that getting a top score involved being both "smart" (whatever that means exactly) and having done a ton of prep work.

Assuming those are SAT scores, at the time Musk would have taken it those scores would be around 90th percentile for math, 75th for verbal, and 92nd for the overall test. That's pretty good.

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