As I understand it, a 1600 on the S.A.T. doesn’t mean that you answered every question correctly. Rather, you can miss some number of questions, and still get a 1600. Why?
You’d think someone would want to distinguish between a genius who turned in a perfect exam and the ordinary slobs who got a less-than-perfect 1600.
Actually, I think they don’t want to make that distinction. As I understand it, ideally SAT scores are standardized to a mean of 500 with a standard deviation of 100 and a cutoff of 3 sigma. That means that everyone who scores in the top 1% (or so) and the bottom 1% is given the same score: 800 and 200, respectively. Since they only report your percentile rank to the nearest 1%, this seems reasonable. I’ll bet most colleges don’t care if someone is ranked 99.2% or 99.6%, and few people would consider someone who got 99.2% to be an “ordinary slob”.
And I thought not every question counted. That is, there are a certain number of questions that are there to be tested for inclusion in future versions of the SAT as valid questions.
So, you could miss those since they don’t count anyway.
Around 1995, the SAT people started curving the tests because…well, because high school students were getting dumber.
OK, perhaps that’s unfair. But, the average score on a 200-800 scale should be around 500, and the actual average from the test was coming out somewhere in the 450 range. (This is from memory, so…). So, they decided to “recenter” the scores.
http://www.collegeboard.com/sat/html/students/new005.html
As for the second part, there’s not really a heck of a lot of difference between the poor schlub who gets his 1500 bumped to a 1600 by the recentering and the person who got 1600 the old way.
#7 ranked student back in high school, graduating with honors and all the medals and robes and NSA and shite, with a 4.2 GPA, scored 960 on the SATs… and he studied for them.
Yep, our school system is tip-top.
(To compare, another friend of mine was ranked #142 in high school, with a 3.0 (adjusted) GPA and a IB diploma, got 1430 on the SATs, which he was happy with, since he stayed up til 4 am the night before the test, having forgotten he had to take it the next morning… and he wasn’t that bright with them test things. I mention this as a criticism of the American school system, not of his academic -hah, lazy slob- prowess. Students are getting dumber and standards are being lowered. The local district had to let some thousands of students who had not met graduation requirements out the gates with a high school diploma, because they were too overcrowded to flunk them O_o)
I’ve given some practice tests–and their results mimicked what they got on the real tests. Some of the practice tests, I believe, were old real tests.
For one in particular, (1996-1997), the score conversion table at the back of the practice test awards an 800 to a raw verbal score of (out of a possible 78) 78, 77, 76, 75, and 74. 73 nets a 780 and 72 a 770. Interestingly, you have to make a raw score of -1 to get the lowest score, 200. In math, you have to get a -3 to get a 200–a raw score of zero would have resulted in a 260.
Fortunately, Zagadka, the results of two particular test-takers, whom I think you singled out to make your point, are not statistically significant.
I remember in the SAT’s that if you answer a multiple chioce question incorrectly you get minus points while if you left it blank it was a wash. Something like (not exactly like but to give you an idea)
correct = 1 point
unanswered = 0 points
incorrect = -0.25 points
all unanswered would get you a 200, all correct an 800 and all incorrect would get you a zero.
Was I dreaming this up?
I believe you are dreaming it up. For one thing, even if you guessed on every question, you’d likely get around 0 points.
That’s right.
For every 5-choice question that’s answered incorrectly, you lose one-fourth of a point. For every 4-choice answered incorrectly, you lose one-third of a point. Unanswered questions are zero points.
The number of questions you can get wrong and still get an 800 ranges from zero to four-ish…verbal usually has a higher curve (allowing more questions to be answered incorrectly or not at all) but even then it’s just a few more.
It’s not like you can miss a significant amount of the questions and get 800. It’s 3/60th, 1/40th of the questions. A 1600 does not indicate a “perfect” score, it indicates that one achieved the maximum points possible. Small yet significant difference 
Ah, I still remember the one question I left blank on my English section. How is a 17 year old supposed to know what “emuneration” is. I got home and it was nowhere to be found in any of the dictionaries in my home. Finally my dad, the old hippy, filled me in that it was a union term. I think not knowing that word was due to the anti-socialist, and therefore anti-union bent of U.S. high schools. I never even heard the word proletariat until my last year of high school. Glad I’m in Canada now.
Could someone who knows also comment on the fact that the first wrong answer hurts more than subsequent ones. If I’m recalling correctly on the English section I got one wrong, left one blank, and ended up with a 750. Maybe the wrong answers that still allow for a perfect score referred to by B]KenP** are in fact those questions slipped in to be put through their paces before inclusion in the next year’s test?
U.S. High Schools are anti-Union? Never seen the teachers union eh? 
I was refering more to the textbooks than the teachers. And unless you happen to get a union head as a history teacher (which finally happened to me in my last year of high school) you don’t ever learn anything beyond a very PC version of the status quo with some propaganda spinkled in. You Americans would be shocked to see how much of the Canadian history cirriculum is focused on the War of 1812 and Canada’s “great victory against Manifest Destiny.”
Sorry, total hijack I know, but the Canadians are aware of California and the rest of the west coast right? Victory indeed. Oh, and welcome to the SDMB. You seem like a nice fellow.
As I recall, the SAT is divided into 7 sections, 3-4 each of writing and math. I know for a fact that one of those sections will never even be graded; it’s thrown in there as a “test” section, to see how students would perform in the future if it were to be included as a real test.
So it is actually possible to miss upwards of 30 questions and still get a perfect score - as long as they’re all in the section that’s going to get trashed.
To illustrate how a negative score can happen: if one were randomly guessing answers, one would expect a zero score (+1 for each correct, -0.25 for each incorrect) but if one were unlucky at his guessing, he could easily achieve a score below zero if fewer than 20% of his guesses were correct or have a slightly positive score if more than 20% of his guesses were correct.
Um, almost none of it? I had no idea about the whole invasion of the Whitehouse until I saw it on T.V. We were taught that it was British troops in Canada that invaded, not Canadians (although, its basically the same thing.) I’ve also never heard of it being called a great victory. Times have changed I guess.
I guess it might just be the mark of an Ontario education in the mid 1990s.
BTW, sorry for causing this thread to veer so far off course my first time out.
Don’t worry they don’t mind, you just have to do this,
[/hijack]