Perhaps the question for the student, and others in the same high school, is whether this is a common pattern at the high school (4.0 students getting SAT scores around the national median), or specific to that student (i.e. other 4.0 students get SAT scores that are in the expected range for 4.0 students).
If it is the usual pattern in the school, there may be problems at the school (excessive grade inflation, low instructional quality) or problems that affect a large number of students at the school (lack of test awareness and preparation, more common among low income and first generation students). Addressing such issues would be different from addressing this situation if it is specific to the student.
My friends daughter was the Valedictorian with a weighted 4.77 ( unweighted 3.95) and after she got a 27 on the ACT her college counselor told her they’d never had a Val get less than a 33 and she HAD to bring it up. The poor kid spent the entire summer before senior year taking practice test after practice test. It worked though and she raised her score to a 32. She has always been a " bad" test taker.
Pity the kids in so many countries where college admission depends on your score on one and only one exam. Kids in many places get suicidal when their test scores aren’t good enough. In other places, the test prep begins years in advance of the actual test. In India, there are test prep centers to be admitted to the test prep centers that prep for the IIT entrance exam. That’s because there are no essay, letters of rec, GPAs or ECs that matter. (At least in India there are other schools you can attend if not IIT. Nevertheless, the pressure is ferocious.)
““bad test takers” as an excuse for sometimes very low SAT/ACT scores compared to high GPA’s”
Naahhh. Not excusable. The SAT/ACT are very low level, easy tests with the most material being tested at the middle school level. Somebody who has a high GPA, certainly got high scores on ALL tests / exams that are part of each class, otherwise how in a world they got a high GPA? Certainly, not just by showing up in class and turning in the homework, tests / exams are usually the most part of any class grade. So, the low SAT/ACT scores for somebody who has a high GPA means only one thing - lack of preparation for the SAT/ACT test. Actually, advanced kids need even more preparation as math material is very old for them. It certainly needs to be refreshed, since for advanced kid, the math part of the SAT/ACT test material is definitely several years old.
One of the former posters on this board had two daughters. One who scored at least one 800 in 7th grade and the other whose SATs were so abysmal she ended up a a school ranked far lower than her grades would have suggested. She wrote an honors thesis that won awards and when grad school time rolled around she did equally terribly on the GREs. The grad school that eventually accepted her for a fully funded PhD program, said they had to waive the GRE requirement, but they took her in. She was doing very well in grad school last I heard.
There really are some people who do not do well on multiple choice tests.
When your future hinges upon the results of these two tests, you can see why kids get anxious. Some people simply can’t handle the stress of working under intense pressure. This says less about their intelligence though, and more about their inexperience in handling stress.
Test anxiety is a very real thing, and I don’t think the problem is adequately addressed in our school system/society.
The Bar exam is pass/fail and tests actual knowledge. Not comparable to the SAT. I’m sure there are a lot of reasons people don’t do well on the SAT and it doesn’t mean they will be failures at life. Lots of colleges out there, lots of career paths.
" the other whose SATs were so abysmal she ended up a a school ranked far lower than her grades would have suggested."
-Choosing college should not be based on any scores / grades. Choosing college should be based on the personal criteria for choosing college. There were 200 in D’s Honors college at one of in-state publics. I have no idea what was the ranking of it, we never checked, definitely not Harvard. The eligibility for Honors was top 2% of HS class and ACT = 31+. I do not call these stats “low”. But I guess, they are low by this thread as people on this thread assume that everybody who attend at in-state public is a loser. D. and her friends have graduated from various Med. Schools now. I guess, they are still not up to the high standards here on this thread, since they did not attend at Harvard for UG.
I know my daughters’ intellectual and personal strengths well (and am not an easy judge.) Neither scored what she should have on the SATs. I wouldn’t just call it anxiety about the tests, nor grade inflation. Mine didn’t really care to ace them, didn’t buy in, didn’t dig in with gusto (even with the books and some prep.) To them, it had little to do with their own sense of what they were prepared to do, in college. They were fired up about college, but not these tests.
Is that a flaw? Maybe. But they ended up at a highly competitive that based decisions or more than test stats, looked for the sort of strengths and interests mine did have. They grad’d very well educated… I don’t worry about the next round of std tests they may have to take. Those would relate to career path choices. The impetus to do well would matter more to them.
I would have recommended the ACT for such a kid. (The old SAT had a lot more ‘reasoning’ style questions on it than the ACT, and most kids don’t learn good reasoning skills in HS.)
yeah, I get that, but when scholarship money depends on tests…
For example, Miami’s kid scored a nice big merit scholarship to the college that fit her the best. And that would not have occurred with an ‘average’ test score. Sure, Miami’s kid would have done just as well grade wise if she had to pay full freight. But why, when the other option is a few dozen hours of concentrated test practice?
Merit scholarships are all tax-free money. I tried to tell my kids that such money is the easiest that they will even earn over their lifetimes.
Missing the point of the thread Miami. The point is that there may be kids that are top 2% of their class, but did not score a 31+ ACT. Do those “bad” test takers deserve a spot in the honors college because their grades are so good. Should kids lower than expected SAT scores be overlooked for admissions, honors, or scholarships if the kid is a “bad” test taker?
Some of my school’s most capable students have had poor results on the SAT and/or ACT. One struggled to crack 2000 on the SAT despite grades better than those of many top scorers. On the ACT, his first (and only) attempt resulted in a 25. Another kid decided not to apply to US colleges after getting a 170 on the PSAT (he’s interviewing at Oxford right now). I managed a 2330, higher than any of my PSAT scores (and it wasn’t thanks to the essay - I scored an 8), on my first try.
Does this indicate I’m somehow more academically capable than these classmates? Not in the view of anyone who’s known us for more than 5 minutes. If anything, the reverse is true. I just happen to be better at jumping through this particular hoop.
Our school has had top students who get scores in the low 1900s, and kids who display little or no academic ability but get a 2100+ on the basis of decent reading comprehension skills, basic math, and a few lucky guesses.
I would think a “bad” test taker would have a terrible time trying to be a doctor in this country. There are REAMS of tests that are required and are multiple choice (MCAT, Steps 1-3, Board exams would be minimum–some subspecialists would have even more). These just get harder and harder. Sure, they get more practical, but they are insanely picky. There are sometimes up to “j” choices–and you still have to choose the best one. And sure, they are technically pass-fail, but many things are determined by how you do on various of these tests.
And by the way, they never stop. Even once you are board-certified, you have to retest every so often (every 10 years in my field).
I think what many people are missing here is that when a student who is Valedictorian at a highly competitive school (where being Val requires having taken every possible honors and AP class and whose Val’s usually go to top 10 universities) get a 28 on the ACT that is considered by most people to be a “bad” score for that kid. It indicates a dichotomy between that students achievement and their testing. But that score is in the top 10 percentile. It certainly does NOT mean that they can’t manage to pass a licensing exam later on. The Attorney who passes the licensing exam by one point, passes. There is no prize given for passing with a perfect or even “good” score.
For every “bad” test taker - who may be very competent students, both in high school and college - there are “good” test takers - kids who are lackluster learners and have grades below their abilities but know how to test well. I’ll take the “bad” test taker the majority of the time.
In some cases, I think it refers to the fact that some kids are really, really good students but may not be as intuitively gifted as a kid that can score sky high on the ACT or SAT. A really good student with a high gpa but lower than expected standardized test profile, is perhaps a highly organized, very motivated kid who works really, really hard who has great memorization skills, writes great papers, follows all the rules in class, participates a lot in class discussions and in general studies a lot. But that same kid may not have as high of an IQ as a kid who doesn’t work as hard as he could in hs classes, but has so much intuitive intelligence he can do extremely well on a standardized test. The type of kid who can see a brand new problem and solve it, vs, the kid who has to have been taught it first and then study it to get it right.
I think that it’s a huge mistake to confuse college board scores with intellectual ability. My daughter was one of those high achievement, high GPA, middling ACT/SAT scorers – (27 on the ACT; 1200 on math/CR of the SAT – did somewhat better with writing added into the mix) — but I happen to know from real-world psychometric testing that my d has gifted level IQ. She was a precocious early reader (self taught at age 4) – so we paid $$ to have her tested at age 6 because we wanted advice as to school placement. WISC IQ was 140. Obviously she qualified for for gifted designation in elementary school – she was small for her age and preferred to socialize with kids her own age, so she was bumped up a couple of grade levels for language arts instruction the first 2 hours of the school day, then back with her age/grade level the rest of the time. Her 8th grade classmates voted her “most likely to succeed.”
D is a hard worker, but she didn’t need to work hard to get good grades in school. That stuff was easy - we kept her busy in elementary & middle school with dance & gymnastics. In fact-like many other students - her first semester in college was an eye-opener because she was used to getting A’s with minimal efforts. (“I got all the answers right on the mid-term – I don’t understand why the professor gave me a C!” — I explained that the prof wanted more than a “right” answer on an essay - that was the first and last C my daughter ever saw. She had a perfect score on the next midterm… once she figured out that college actually required some effort).
Why above-average but not stellar scores on the ACT & SAT? (And later the GRE). I have no clue. My son scored well enough on an unprepped, single sitting of the PSAT to qualify for NM, and later aced the GRE and got a job teaching test prep for a major test-prep company. His job wasn’t to teach content for test prep- his job was to teach test-taking tricks. I’m a good test-taker too… so I think that the only “Intuitive” quality that sets us apart is that we intuit all of the tricks. We are sensitive to clues in the questions and the question structure that suggest the answer; we understand intuitively that it can be better to opt for the 50% chance of getting things right once we’ve narrowed down the possibilities to 2 answers, and to move on… rather than to agonize to sort out which of those two is the “right” one.
One huge difference between my d. and my son & I is that she is much more careful and thorough in everything she does. She tends to do everything right the first time around. In real life, that’s probably a time saver for her – I’ll rush through things and then have to come back to clean up my mistakes. But maybe that part of her personality is what didn’t mesh well with the design of standardized college entrance exams. She had no difficulty at all with AP exams-- give her an opportunity to show what she knows, and she shines.
Anyway, for us it doesn’t matter. My DD was admitted to and graduated from more prestigious colleges than her high-scoring older brother, so it didn’t end up meaning anything for college admissions either.
But it irks me, obviously, when people somehow equate SAT scores to IQ.
SAT/ACT are not designed to test IQ nor are they validated for that purpose. So anyone who assumes that there is a correlation on an individual level simply doesn’t understand much about testing. A lot of very high IQ people flub the tests, for a variety of reasons. And a lot of moderate IQ people do very well, though I think that extensive test prep may be involved in those cases.