Would 1580-->1600 SAT make a difference? & other UChicago admissions questions

MohnGedachtnis
Thu, 30 Jan 2020 21:38:52 +0000

While 1600 is obviously the least common outcome, 1580 is a close third (behind 1590).

It doesn’t matter much, but I am pretty sure this is wrong, both actually and theoretically.

It looks like College Board no longer publishes the actual number of unique test-takers who get any particular score, but it used to. And when it did, the number of people with a “perfect” score (in those days, 2400) was definitely higher than the number of people with “almost perfect” scores (2390, 2380, 2370). 2390 and 2370 were the two rarest scores; 2400 was fourth or fifth. You had to get to 2350 before the number of people with that score was meaningfully higher than the number of people with 2400.

That’s not surprising at all. There’s a good reason for that. The SAT does not calibrate whatever it is that it measures – ability, achievement, aptitude, smartness, preparation – above the 1600 level. Some of the people with 1600s would be getting 1650 or 1700 if the test were set up to make finer distinctions at the very top. A few might get 1800 or 1900. Others . . . 1600 was really the best they could do.

The number of people who would score exactly 1600 is certainly slightly smaller than the number of people who would score exactly 1590 on an expanded test. But the number of people capable of scoring 1600 or more (if there were more) is quite a bit larger than the number of people who would score exactly 1590.

That said, it really doesn’t make a difference. There were about 370 people who scored 1600 last year on a single test. There may have been 650 or so who scored 1580 or more. You can multiply it by about 1.8 to estimate the number of people with equivalent credentials from the SAT and the ACT. That’s still a really small group of people. And no individual college gets applications from more than a fraction of them.

(People will sometimes say, “Harvard could fill its class twice over with applicants who have perfect SATs.” But that’s hyperbole. It can’t. It doesn’t want to, but even if it did want to, it couldn’t fill one whole class with people who had scored either 1600 on the SATs or 36 on the ACT and applied there. Not even close. And many of the ones who do apply are rejected or waitlisted in favor of people with somewhat lower test scores but other desirable qualities.)

(Superscoring of course increases the number of people who can say they got 1600 on their SATs, but not by a giant number. Instead of 370, maybe it’s 500 or 600; 1000-1100 with ACT equivalence. I saw a convincing analysis of this long ago on CC, but I can’t replicate it.)