Age and Maths (colleges in US)

ItsJustSchool
Sun, 05 Oct 2014 07:53:16 +0000

The SAT is a nationally-normed test that tests math knowledge up until Calculus. Traditionally, most students who take calculus in the US system take it their senior year, while the SAT test is taken either junior or first semester of senior year. Because of the US traditional course sequence and the SAT being nationally normed resulting consistently in a Bell Curve (normal distribution) fit with a mean of ~500 and a standard deviation of ~115 (http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-2012.pdf), the most elite students find they score very well on the Math section of the SAT. It is claimed by some schools that they use the SAT simply to normalize grading schemes across disparate schools, so it simply serves a a rough guide as to how inflated or realistic the submitted grades are. The SAT is taken by a broad swath of college-bound students, including not only non-math majors, but also low-threshold institutions, and is not considered an elite test, nor one that differentiates abilities of those who are more competent/advanced in their math abilities.