<p>You’re probably right that better-performing students are able to finish sections quickly and thus avoid many errors. However, it is entirely possible to double-check every answer and still make a silly mistake, especially in such a high-pressure situation–and this scenario leaves aside the obvious issue of discrepancies among tests. There’s probably a jump in associated skill level between 2300 and 2400, but I don’t buy that the difference between 2400 and 2380 is anything other than luck, in most cases.</p>
<p>To adjust silverturtle’s analogy: if runner X beats runner Y by 0.01 seconds, to say definitively that runner Y is an inferior runner (and would certainly lose again if the race were repeated) is at best a stretch.</p>
<p>Silverturtle says:
"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. "
Good lord. I think you just proved my point. Your writing above is turgid at best, and the logic flawed.
The SAT does not test brilliance.<br>
The writing section tests the ability to apply a certain set of rules to sentence construction, and to churn out a quick , brief, essay. This has very little to do with the ability to write a great essay, or indeed, a great poem, play, speech, novel, or any other form you care to choose.
The reading section tests nothing that relates to brilliance - it merely shows one’s ability to understand relatively obvious material.
The math section merely tests basic skills as well, and ignores problems that take more than a very few minutes.<br>
Analogies are always flawed, so I will merely note in passing that the 100 and 200 are different events - runners at the elite levels specialize sufficiently that performance in the 100 does not predict the 200.</p>
<p>Upon rereading, I disagree. Also, your characterization is, at best, irrelevant.</p>
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<p>You must support this point; the remainder of your post failed to.</p>
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<p>The Writing section tests more than sentence construction and requires skills that extend beyond knowledge of a set of rules, such as in the Improving Paragraphs section. </p>
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<p>I agree.</p>
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<p>I do not know why you keep returning to this concept of “brilliance” nor what you mean by it. Your claim that the material is obvious is belied by the average scores on the section.</p>
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<p>I consider the fact that the Math section focuses on basic skills a strength; otherwise, students who have experienced subpar educations would be disadvantaged further, in favor of the type of students with whom you seem to have had the most contact. Certainly, one’s ability to solve basic problems holds predictive value for one’s ability to solve higher-level problems.</p>
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<p>Inherently so.</p>
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<p>Although I don’t know what you mean by “does not predict,” the feature that you describe is integral to my use of the analogy; so I don’t see what your point is.</p>
<p>I would just like to point out that the key word in silverturtle’s post is “randomly”. If one selects a random person out of the world’s population and pits him or her against another random person in a 100 meter race, then one can assume the victor can beat the other in a 200 meter race as well, though this outcome is not necessarily guaranteed. There would indeed be cases of the loser beating the victor in the second event. Bringing up the notion of elite runners is irrelevant because using them as test cases negates the arbitrary selection of the competitors.</p>
<p>While the first part may be true, the second is certainly not. A 2400 does not necessarily show an obsession with test preparation- many very smart kids, with a little fortune, can get this without extensive test studying; it’s not a prohibitively hard test.</p>
Even that point is not really valid… performance in the 100 predicts 200 performance extremely, extremely well. Olympic caliber 100m runners are olympic caliber 200m runners. In fact, those two events are probably the two closest related out of any two events. </p>
<p>As I see it, the running analogy is flawed logic. To wit: the runner with the best time will always finish a race ahead of a slower runner. Whereas, the student who scores a perfect 2400 on their SAT will not always gain admission over a student whose SAT scores are less than perfect. Unlike a race, college acceptance is not a meritocracy; the fastest runner does not always win. In the race for college acceptance, sometimes the winner is decided not on the best time, but perhaps on more unpredictable factors, such as the clothes they are wearing, or the grace of their stride.</p>
<p>Nepotism is a lie made up by the media.
Elitism only exists in your subconscious thoughts.
A 2400 is greater than a 2300. I’m assuming none of you passed 3rd grade math.</p>
<p>1,500,000 divided by 382 = 3947.68. Roughly a 2400 puts you in the “IQ”, “aptitude”, or “whatever the SAT claims they test for” of 1 in every 4000 kids who take the SAT which is itself a select group. All in all there should have been around 3,800,000 students in the Class of 2010. In reality receiving a 2400 is about the “IQ”, “aptitude”, or “whatever the SAT claims the test is for” of 1 in 10,000 people.</p>
<p>I scored a 2400 as did 3 other people in my graduating class. Two of them I would consider very bright, probably end up attending HYPS. However, the other one who received the 2400 is more likely a 1 in 100,000 in the US. He’s one of those kids who will go to one of the HYPSMC and breeze through undergraduate with a 4.0, go on to a prestigious PhD program, become a tenured professor at a prestigious school before he is 35, and eventually prove some equation that less than 500 people in the world even knew it existed.</p>
<p>At the end of the day will the student who received a 2380 be a more successful college student than the student who received a 2330? Probably not. However, keeping in mind my anecdotal story the student who received the 2400 probably has a higher chance of being the next Einstein.</p>
<p>I shall not discuss the quality of your writing, silverturtle. It was a cheap shot, but also my first and honest reaction to your posting. Let the matter rest there. </p>
<p>My point is that the SAT is a limited tool. The SAT is meant to broadly sort students. A great score on the SAT does not indicate greatness. It cannot. </p>
<p>Why does this matter? Let us return to the basic question. Is there a difference between a 2300 and a 2400? Well, even those of us who may not have scored an 800 in the math section of the SATs, can determine that there is a 100 point difference. But this question, presumably, asks something a little deeper – does that 100 point difference matter? I think not , in part, because what the SAT measures is not brilliance. It measures something rather different – the ability to do short problems, and answer short questions, in the areas of reading, writing and mathematics. The difference between doing this perfectly and doing this slightly less than perfectly is simply not important.</p>
<p>To use another sports analogy – it is as if you were classifying pitchers based on a single clocking of their fastball.<br>
To use some from the world of the arts – it is as if you were classifying actors by their ability to recite lines, or prima ballerinas on their ability to do 64 fouettes.</p>
<p>Um, your friend with the 2400 might be smarter than Joe Schmoe with a 2380, but that proves exactly nothing. We’re talking the difference between Random Person X and Random Person Y whose SAT scores differ by 20 points.</p>
<p>YES, a 2400 is better than a 2380. YES, anyone would rather have a 2400 than a 2380. YES, your achievement is great and you should tell everybody yada yada yada.</p>
<p>But, in general and in the abstract (meaning not your friend vs. Joe Schmoe), does a 2380 indicate lesser intelligence/aptitude/whatever than a 2400 does? If the difference is missing two questions instead of one, misreading “product” for “sum,” or looking at line 38 instead of line 48, then your statistics are flawed and kind of silly.</p>
<p>It certainly was an immature and cheap shot. The following, I reflect, is quite ironic:</p>
<p>“Good lord. I think you just proved my point. Your writing above is turgid at best, and the logic flawed.”</p>
<p>That you believe my writing proves your point reflects unfavorably on your logic; that you shared as much reflects poorly, as well, on your restraint. </p>
<p>Over the months, nemom, I have addressed the points you cite. You continue to fail to recognize that the limitations of a metric do not annihilate its predictive validity. And as for cases in which “silly” mistakes (i.e., errors that do not correlate with any meaningful attribute) cause a score to go down, the resultsimilarlyis merely a limiting of the correlation between SAT scores and meaningful attributes, not an annihilation thereof. Whether the correlation is brought so low that the distinction is no longer practically meaningful is a subjective question to which you are entitled an opinion, but you have employed false logic in reaching that opinion.</p>
<p>generally, no… but there are variables, such as the individual scores… are they all above 750? also depends i suppose on if that was a first time in freshman year. if so, i’d say, give it another try and aim for the 2400… just for fun… no real reason to do it.</p>
<p>others will give their opinions… that’s all i’ve given, is my opinion, not a statement of fact :-)</p>
<p>I agree: generally no. There are, however, some cases in which I would recommend retaking if the person is willing to do so, such as when one of the three scores is 700 or not much higher and the person believes that retaking will yield 800 or not much lower, especially if his or her first-choice school accepts Score Choice.</p>
<p>Like many such discussions, this one got bogged down partly because of a failure to distinguish between two questions: whether the difference between a score of 2300 and a score of 2400 *should *matter, and whether it *does *matter. What I’ve read and observed suggests to me that it does matter at the most selective colleges, whether it should or not.</p>
<p>Chocmilk - all the info I have says there is no need to retake a 800/750/760. Admissions officers at elite schools have said as much, as does our college guidance department. We have, usually, a flock of seniors with 2300+ scores and they nearly all do very well. FOr those who didn’t get into their first choice, there has never been any suggestion that it has anything to do with scores. (And, yes, that list of first choices includes plenty of Ivies, Stanford, MIT and other very selective schools.)
Yours, like mine, should consider himself ‘One and Done’ - there will be plenty of other things to spend his precious time on.</p>