<p>“I think Ben made a good point, too, regarding your concern about how SAT I scores are used for college admission. The SAT I is a task with particular “rules of the game” that don’t correspond exactly to how a working scientist or mathematician does his day-by-day work, and yet scoring high on the SAT I is a learnable skill. A high schooler who is smart enough to thrive at Caltech is smart enough to learn how to turn out an SAT I score within the range of scores found among admitted students each year.”</p>
<p>I definitely agree with you there. Getting a high score on the SAT is easy, but I think the problem is that some very qualified students just don’t want to really take the time to study for it (since I don’t see how studying for the SATs would do a student any good in expanding the mind), and I don’t think they should be held accountable for it.</p>
<p>One could say ‘Well, hey, it’s a silly test, and it may be a waste of time, but just do it!’ For most public schools, I’d agree, since there’s not much else to judge an applicant by. But with schools like Caltech, college admissions comittees can see essays, extracurricular activities, grades, AP scores, research, etc., and I don’t see why SAT scores hold such importance when there are just so many other factors that to me would be more sensible to judge by.</p>
<p>(And tokenadult, as for my ACT score… I may have scored above the 75th percentile for Stanford, but I scored under the 25th percentile for Caltech. In fact, Caltech is the only school in the country where I’m not in the mid-50 range, which really seems to make apparent the fact that it’s very strict on standardized tests. Note that the 25th percentile marker for Caltech is in the upper 99th percentile. Isn’t that a bit harsh?)</p>