<p>I believe the difference is 100 points.</p>
<p>^^Hahahaha what a witty and unexpected response. /facepalm</p>
<p>I find it hard to believe that in terms of admissions, there is a heck of a lot of a difference between the two scores. Maybe in some rare cases, but overall, I think that if a person is going to be rejected from a school with a 2300, the same will happen with a 2400.</p>
<p>@1029384</p>
<p>That’s what I get for not checking the link. There are other studies that corroborate what I have said. </p>
<p>And relationship between scores break down at the extremes because of sample size issues and because people study the for the SAT.</p>
<p>I think schools will look at something like an 800 differently from a score thirty-forty points lower. I believe it was Silverturtle himself who posted somewhere that the percentage of applicants applying to top schools such as Stanford with 800s had a higher acceptance rate than those with marginally lower scores.</p>
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<p>Being the child of immigrants myself, I’d have to agree with this. Though immigrants aren’t necessarily poor, per se, they’re unlikely to be wealthy. For the most part, though, at least with Asian and Indian immigrants today, they are intelligent, driven, and hard-working, and expect their children to do better/be better than them.</p>
<p>Just my two cents.</p>
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<p>As I indicated, I believe that the optimal scenario, more specifically, would be one in which all students have plateaued in their preparation, which is distinct from your proposal. Both scenarios are equally impossible to achieve. </p>
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<p>It is well established that IQ scores can be improved by practice.</p>
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<p>An unsuccessful concordance formula does not indicate the strength or weakness of the correlation.</p>
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<p>This is true. However, the potential marginal benefit in scoring 800 that is suggested by the higher acceptance rate was small enough to be satisfactorily dismissed by confounding variables’ effects. At other schools, however, the jump was more significant than at Stanford. This difference across schools, which is unlikely to be accompanied by a corresponding difference in the confounding variables’ effects, suggests strongly that small increases at the high end of the score range are meaningful at certain schools.</p>
<p>I just posted this on the other thread, but it may be relevant here as well:</p>
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<p>When a student scores lower than 2400, the SAT can reasonably be said to indicate the best that they could do (on a SAT). When a student scores 2400, there is always a question of how much higher they could go on a harder SAT. In other words, a score of 2400 does not indicate an upper limit.</p>
<p>^^ I don’t think a score below 2400 indicates that the person is necessarily close to their best. Any person who scores a 2400 knows that there is an element of luck and on any given test they might have missed a perfect score (careless mistakes, etc). So, if there were a longer more difficult version of the test plenty of people who scored around 2350 might outscore those who had 2400’s.</p>
<p>Okay. Point taken, so I’ll amend my point by borrowing a term from silverturtle. Let’s say a student whose test scores “plateau” below 2400 can reasonably be said to have measured the best the student can do on a SAT, whereas a student who consistently scores 2400 has an unmeasured upper limit.</p>
<p>An important point to note - there are a considerable number of very intelligent kids who do not take the SAT more than one and who do not do extensive study for it. Their scores - in the 2200-2300s - are more than sufficient to demonstrate mastery of the SAT skill and knowledge sets. They probably could manage a 2400 given sufficient effort but chose not to. They expend their energy on other things.</p>
<p>It is also worth noting that scoring a 2400 on the SAT does not indicate brilliance.
Scoring an 800 on the writing section does not demonstrate an ability to write great prose or poetry.
Scoring an 800 on the reading section does not demonstrate an ability to read difficult and subtle works deeply.
Scoring an 800 on the math section does not demonstrate ability in higher mathematics.</p>
<p>^ Generalized certainties, indeed, are rarely true.</p>
<p>Nemom, it’s not true that everyone who gets a perfect ACT/SAT score took the test multiple times or prepped for it extensively. My son got a 36.0 on his ACT last June, as a sophomore and a perfect 240 on his PSAT this Oct. as a junior. He took the ACT while nursing a sore neck and the PSAT while fighting a cold and fatigue from restless sleep; on neither day was he at the top of his game academically.</p>
<p>His comment is that both tests are ridiculously easy for anyone following a “most challenging” curriculum – a score of “2200 to 2300” certainly does not show full mastery of the material.</p>
<p>There is a qualitative difference in the perfect scorer and the somewhat-close-to-perfect scorer: The perfect scorer is usually able to work much faster on the vast bulk of the problems, allowing extra time to double-check and correct sloppy errors and to take several minutes to actually solve the handful of fairly tough problems for sure, rather than narrow the field down to two answers and make an educated guess. Such a test-taker would have to have a really bad day under truly adverse conditions to ever do worse than an SAT 2350.</p>
<p>I know full well that not all perfect ACT/SAT scorers did extensive prep or multiple sittings. In fact, I know one. This student did some prep and one sitting (possibly did one at age 12 or less for CTY). My point is that there are students who score very high after one sitting and choose not to do more prep and an additional sitting.
I also know a set of very high scoring students who are , by most standards brilliant. They achieve at the national/international level in competitions. They are taking upper level and even grad level college courses as high school students (generally juniors and seniors). Of the ten or fifteen I know fairly well, exactly one scored a 2400. All the rest were above 2200 - probably nearly all above 2300. All were advised not to retake the test and all have gotten into top schools - generally their first choice.
Congratulations to LoremIpsum’s son. A 2400 is a fine achievement. It’s just not magic.</p>
<p>Silverturtle,
Your comment baffles me. Please expand on it.</p>
<p>Admission officers from across the country have answered this question on numerous occasions. Here are just two articles from a recent google search:</p>
<p>[Guidance</a> Office: Answers From Harvard’s Dean, Part 2 - NYTimes.com](<a href=“Guidance Office: Answers From Harvard's Dean, Part 2 - The New York Times”>Guidance Office: Answers From Harvard's Dean, Part 2 - The New York Times)</p>
<p>“With the SAT, small differences of 50 or 100 points or more have no significant effect on admissions decisions.” </p>
<p>– William Fitzsimmons, Dean of Harvard Admissions</p>
<p>[Middlebury</a> Dean Says SAT or ACT is ‘Seldom a Deal Breaker’ - NYTimes.com](<a href=“Middlebury Dean Says SAT or ACT is 'Seldom a Deal Breaker' - The New York Times”>Middlebury Dean Says SAT or ACT is 'Seldom a Deal Breaker' - The New York Times)</p>
<p>"It’s not unusual for the middle 50 percent of our entering classes to have SAT scores on each of the tests from the mid-600s to mid-700s. That is to say that if your scores are in that range, they will probably have a “neutral” effect on your candidacy at the nation’s most selective colleges.</p>
<p>If your scores are higher than that, you may be at an advantage in the admissions process at those colleges, but by no means guaranteed of being admitted. If they are lower, you are probably at a disadvantage, but again, not necessarily out of the running.</p>
<p>Thankfully, selective college admissions remains an art and not a science, and since it involves people making judgments about other people, it is a process that is not easily reducible to a formula.</p>
<p>That’s why the more nuanced judgments that we make about applicants on the basis of their recommendations from teachers and counselors, their outside interests and their essays are what frequently help us identify the applicants who will bring the most to — and get the most from — their college educations."</p>
<p>– Robert Clacket, Dean of Admissions Middlebury College</p>
<p>Who cares, it’s just the SAT. Let the adcoms determine the significant difference between a 2300 and 2400 and be done with it. If you really want to know, become an admissions officer at a selective university.</p>
<p>@LoremIpsum:</p>
<p>No offense to you or your son, but your anecdotal evidence doesn’t count for anything. That’s a sample size of 1 here. </p>
<p>I don’t have the data, but it’s very likely nearly everyone who gets a perfect ACT or SAT score has had at least some previous exposure to these tests. Just taking the PSAT counts as practice for the SAT - it gives you a feeling for pacing and you don’t have to read the directions for each section when you take the SAT. Again, no data, but I would assume that most all perfect scorers have had some previous exposure.</p>
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<p>My implicit point was that the fact that something does not necessarily indicate the presence of something else is not a particularly meaningful reality; analogously, my claim that the fact that randomly selected person x who beat randomly selected person y in a 100-meter race will not necessarily beat person y in a 200-meter race, while true, disregards the reality that it is likely that person x will win in the 200-meter race as well.</p>
<p>Another stupid statement. pff of course 2400 is way better than a 2300</p>
<p>I personally have a 2300 myself but I would do a lot of things just to get a 2400.</p>