SAT Scores can often go hand in hand. But not always. Obviously to get an elite score of 2300+ Some intelligence is required. But I think anybody with average intelligence (Iq:100) can get 2000 or higher if they are given every chance to succeed.
A really bright motivated student named Nick has an IQ of 140. Nick is ranked #1 out of 400 in his high school class at a fairly competitive public high school. His passion is math and science but he is also a gifted writer and a well above average reader. He scores a 221 on his PSAT in October on his Junior year. After about 3 months of prepping for the SAT, going over some Direct Hits vocab. Maybe learning some grammar rules he hadn’t seen in a few years he was ready try and ACE the SAT. He takes his SAT in March and two and a half weeks later he is celebrating his perfect 2400. A year later he would arrive to start his 4 years of Undergrad at Princeton. He would then go to Harvard Medical School and become a very successful Neurosurgeon.
A really not bright student named Justin has an IQ of 93. Any motivation he has for school stems from his parents taking his Xbox away if he doesn’t get at least a 3.0 GPA. His class rank is about 195 out of 400 at an average high school. He is in his Junior year barely passing core Algebra II. His grasp of the English Language is just above that of a hillbillies and probably doesn’t know either definition of the word colon. On a Wednesday night in March his parents told him that he is to take the SAT this Saturday. Justin is not happy because he was planning to lock himself in his room all day Saturday to play COD and down countless Monsters. Now he has to get up early to take some stupid test that doesn’t mean anything. Justin see’s that his essay prompt is about politics and he mixes up Governor for Government. His first sentence in the essay in a run on sentence. Justin is familiar with most of the math material. He is pretty bad at math though. He was most confident about his answer to an average speed answer at the end of a math section though. He couldn’t believe they would make a question that easy. On his critical reading he had seen about half of those vocab words before. The passage based reading questions was probably his strongest area on the entire test. He was able to find a few of the answers in the passages and the time limit saved him from answering the harder questions wrong. The writing section was probably his worse because the way Justin talks and writes is the way the CB likes to word its most obviously wrong answers. Two weeks later Justin’s mom is mortified to see that her son scored a 1360 on his SAT. Justin thinks it is lucky because if you split up that number you get Xbox 1 and Xbox 360. He would average about seven minimum wage jobs a year. He got about as many welfare checks as he did paychecks.
Another student only somewhat smarter than Justin has an IQ of 100. We will call her Amy. Amy’s daddy is an executive producer for a TV show. Amy has gotten through school with fairly good grades because of tutors and teachers that hold her hand. She get’s A’s in college prep classes and B’s in AP Classes. Amy’s daddy tells her the summer between her sophomore and junior year that she will be taking a very expensive SAT prep class. Amy is at first very mad because she was planning to spend the summer at her rich boyfriends summer home in Santa Monica. Her dad told her that if she could score above a 2000 that he would buy her a brand new Porsche in any color she liked. (Pink) Amy started to take this prep class very seriously. She had only completed Algebra II/Trig and was only in Pre Calc by the time she had taken the SAT but made sure she has basic Algebra and Geometry nailed as she prepped for the class. She was always a decent reader and writer. Her prep class made use of Direct Hits and Amy made sure she learned as much of the vocab as possible. Amy took her SAT in November of her Junior year. She ended up scoring a 2060, just enough for her new Porsche. Her SAT Score, along with her decent grades and Cheer Leading got her into USC. (Her dad had a connection). Amy would keep this Porsche and would drive to USC with it from her personal condo that her dad bought her for surviving freshman year of college. Amy would decide after $240,000 spent on college that she wanted to be a hair dresser. She would get her own shop right on Wilshire Boulevard and would marry the starting Center for the LA Lakers.
This student is just as smart as nick. We will call him Brian. Brian actually tested higher on the IQ test than Nick did. Brian scored a 146. Brian grew up in a trailer park in Tuscon. He never knew his dad and his mom worked as a waitress at the local Denny’s. He also had 4 younger half siblings he had to take care of. He came through a pretty bad school district but did better than average. He got mostly A’s but his school only offered a couple of AP Classes. (AP US History and AP Composition) He was very gifted at math but there was no accelerated math track at his school so he was a junior in Algebra II/Trig. His English teacher told him that he should consider going to college. (The yearly average number of students going to a four year straight out of high school at this particular school could be counted on one hand) He wasn’t even given a blue book but rather a booklet of some practice SAT questions. Brian went over this booklet for a few days before the test. When test day arrived Brian realized that the test booklet did not provide near enough space for him to fit his essay. He had barely begun to talk about his first example when he ran out of room. He tried to fix this as much as he could but he only had 6 minutes left at this point. His essay ended up being very poor. Brian knew much of the vocabulary but would get mixed up on words with similar meanings. He also over thought a handful of passage based reading questions causing him to pick wrong answers. On the grammar he did good for the most part. The improving sentences was what hurt him the most. He had know idea what the SAT looked for as far as style went. This caused him to miss a lot of the questions. The math he felt like he knew how to do everything on, but he also was unaware that the SAT math literally went out of it’s way to ensure that you made stupid mistakes. This caused him to make several careless mistakes along the way. A few weeks later Brian got his score report back and he had scored 1880. Brian would go to JC but would end up transferring to UC Santa Barbara. He had to take out Student Loans to pay for undergrad. He would have to take out even more for when he did his Post Grad at Cal Tech. He would be able to pay them back fairly easily when he started making 6 digits right after getting his masters at Cal Tech.