Re-Centered SAT Scores
Those of you who were forced to take the College Board's Scholastic Aptitude/Assessment Test as part of your admission to post-secondary school any time before April 1,1995 may be interested to note that the College Board now admits that your scores were in most cases artificially low. A "recentering" was done for tests starting in April of '95, to move the average scores up from their diminishing low 400's levels to the true average of 500 (halfway between 200 (the score for leaving all questions blank on the SAT), and 800 (the score for all correct answers)), as well as to re-align the two tests so that equivalent scores on the Math and Verbal sections indicate equivalent percentile scores versus all other test takers, and to finally admit that either students are getting dumber, or that the education of SAT takers from the last "baseline" class(1941, when the SAT was taken by about 10,000 students, mostly from prep schools headed to the country's top universities). varies so significantly from that of the new baseline class (1990), that the scores were not relevant.
Purposefully or not, it is now much easier to score a 1600 on the exam. A pre-1995 score of 730 or above on the Verbal and 780 or above on Math will return the post-1995 test taker a "perfect" 800 score on each test. The "minimum" score on the Verbal exam (presumably, the score you would get if you left all questions blank) is now 30 points higher, at 230. The minimum score on the Math exam is still 200.
And as if that isn't annoying enough, the test-takers since 1994 have had more time on some parts, are allowed to use calculators, and are no longer tested on antonyms. Hrrrumph!
This was reported in USA Today ($2.50 for the full article) from whom the conversion table in use on this page was taken, among other places. See below for a letter to the editor from the President of the College Board.
For those of you with too much self-esteem wrapped up in these numbers, the 2-bit Idea Mill presents:
The SAT Auto-Recentron | ||
If you had been scored on the "re-centered" scale with today's High School Seniors,you would have scored: |
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Aggregate Re-centered score: An increase of . Congratulations! |
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For the paranoid: No information you enter here is recorded or monitored--it stays entirely within your browser. Credit to Danny Goodman's SSN calculator for many of the generic functions of this JavaScript. The Auto-Recentron is © 1996ff Dan Rinzel, and I would appreciate feedback on and acknowledgement of its use. All commercial rights reserved. Disclaimer: No warranty is expressed or implied, and no official sanction has been received from the College Board or any insitute of higher education. It will NOT help you get in (or get back in) to any college! | ||
Why We Recentered the SATThe Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT) is good at detecting changes in students' academic preparation for college, but that is not why students take it or why colleges use the scores ["Are Test Scores Improving?," editorial, Aug. 31]. The test's major value is its ability to predict the success of individual students in the first year or two of college. Its primary assets are its predictive validity and reliability, which help colleges be objective and fair as they sort through various, more subjective admissions criteria.We decided to recenter the SAT score scale because our first obligation is to score and scale the SAT so that it will most fairly and accurately predict students' prospects in college. Recentering does this by distributing scores to reflect the composition of the million plus college-bound seniors who take the SAT today, not the 10,654 who took it in 1941 -- mostly men (62 percent) and many from independent schools (41 percent). Yet some would index today's students' scores to that small and unrepresentative group of students who took the SAT prior to World War 11. In 1996, 1,084,725 students took the test; 53 percent were women, 30 percent minorities and 83 percent from public high schools. Anyone concerned about score trends should know that all trends remain clear after recentering because concordance tables distributed to schools and colleges make it easy to translate old scores into recentered scores for individuals and groups, and to track average scores over time. DONALD M. STEWART
President Letter to the Editor - The Washington Post 9/15/96 |