Most common answers on the SAT

PWNtheSAT
Mon, 14 Mar 2011 15:13:01 +0000

So I saw someone on Yahoo! Answers suggesting that C was the most common answer choice on the SAT. I hear people say this all the time and it drives me batty, mostly because I’m afraid students will actually consider such misinformation actionable and fill in a bunch of C’s. You deserve what you get when you do that, I know, but still I worry.

Anyway, I decided to spend some time this morning counting up all the choices in the Blue Book (leaving out Grid-Ins, obviously) to prove a point, and ended up proving the point much less firmly than I had hoped to. There’s actually a fair amount of variability over what seems to me to be a big enough sample to mitigate most of the noise.

Here’s a link to the data.
https://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?hl=en&hl=en&key=0Agar2-EatDDSdGZPeUI5UE9mSEtEcnBrWVRzbnpmSkE&output=html

I don’t really expect any of this to be useful information, but I did want to solicit your opinions on this, since this is a community of people who seem to think about the SAT as much as I do.

Also, I know there are some people on this board who are at university and still poke around here. I’m interested in hearing from someone who’s taken a stats class more recently than me about statistical significance of, say, the infrequency of A. So, you know, if you wanna nerd it up with me, I’m up for that. PM me.