As I had no credentials to show my students that I was an authority on the subject, I would take one of the standardized tests (Usually GRE) every year and bring the results to class. Once I took the entire GRE math section without reading the questions. I got 2 wrong (resulting in a ‘perfect’ score, you can pay extra to see which questions you got wrong). Admittedly, this kind of familiarity with the tests is a bit nuts. I did not get perfect scores on the SAT’s, but I last took them when I was twelve. I then skipped a couple of grades and finally dropped out of high school so I could go to college full time. Turns out I’m not all that bright (about 138 IQ). I just test well.
Johns Hopkins had, and still has I think, a lot of programs for ‘gifted’ children. I think there were about 4 or 5 that got ‘perfect’ 1600 scores at age twelve in 1978, the year I got involved. There were all kinds of studies done on us. One of the most interesting, to me, was that all of us but one that year had a nearest older sibling at least 4 years older. (The one exception was an only child.) There were a lot of theories bouncing around about women giving their womb time to heal and such. I haven’t kept track of it in years though.
All of this is from memory, but I think I can dredge up documentation for the studies if someone is really interested. I have a big box full of stuff from those days in a closet somewhere. I have a box full of class materials for GRE, LSAT, and MSAT too. Next time I move all this will probably get trashed so let me know if you want any out of date standardized test info. I can’t believe I’ve already carried this crap halfway across the country.
“It’s not often that a school is graced with a student who has received a 1600 on
her SATs. In fact, the College Board reported that of the 2,048,000 students
who took SATs last year, just 673 achieved a perfect score.”
I’d be interested if it’s not too much trouble. I’ve read that each child tends to scores a few points lower than the next-older child and that twins score a few points lower than non-twins. I score higher than any of my 5 older siblings (but #2 an #4 are very close to my scores). #1-#5 came in 7 years, then there was a 6-year hiatus before I came. Two of my cousins are very bright and they are #1 and #4 of 5 births pretty evenly spaced at 2 years.
I’m not sure whether it has anything to do with fetal development (but it very well may). It may have more to do with the older child getting less attention when a younger child is born soon after. It may have something to do with the family-size correlation. At least one recent study has found that children in large families have lower IQs than children in small families. (That conclusion is at odds with my experience and intuition.) IIRC at least one of these studies found that the birth-order-IQ correlation disappears when comparing families of the same size.
Why should anyone care about your SAT after you’ve begun attending university?
IIRC, my predeliction for underachievement was quite accurately reflected in my SAT score. Not that it held up my education one whit nor measured my intelligence.
I got an 800 math and a 760 verbal. Interestingly, I found out later that, because of the particular calibration my year, if I had gotten all the verbal questions right, I’d have received an 800; if I had skipped the one question I got wrong, I’d have received a 780.
I also got an 800 analytical on my GREs.
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Geenius – I also received perfect score on the GRE analytical, but it was 900 back in 1963, rather than 800. Presumably college makes one 100 units smarter
Back in 1959-60, when I took the SAT’s, it didn’t seem that significant to score 800 on the math. No questions were terribly difficult. One had to do moderately difficult work quickly ahd accurately.
For a while I carried in my wallet the little slip of paper giving my perfect score. 40 years later it seems pretty unimportant…
Interesting. What year? When I applied to UT Austin in 1981 they made a huge deal about SAT/ACT scores. They told me that they were not letting anyone in to the college of engineering with less than 1500. I had scored a 35 on the ACT (this supposedly equates to somewhere between 1560 and 1590 on the SAT), so I got in.
