What did you score on the SAT? (And can you tutor?)

dailyheights

I'm starting this topic mainly to promote an interesting volunteer opportunity, for those of you with some free time one afternoon a week this fall to help kids at the ACORN Community High School in Crown Heights (561 Grand Avenue between Bergen and Dean) prepare for the SAT:

http://brooklynian.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=5370

Judging from the traffic patterns on these boards, a lot of you have "previous commitments" in the late afternoon... nevertheless, I think our goal should be to get at least 2 people from the boards to volunteer. It's only one Monday or Wednesday a week!

Oh... and do the poll.

dailyheights

Who's going to give it up, on the record?

Mine was 1350. I always imagined that was at a pretty good place on the bell curve, but I honestly have no idea.

EDITED ... Well... that's a wake up call. My high school self looks positively dense compared to you smart people

emily

I wish they'd been doing this last spring. I had plenty of time then and just took on a bunch of new commitments. Although I'm not sure how one would go about coaching someone for the SAT, other than telling them to get a lot of sleep and proofread carefully.

doctorj

Why is there no option for "don't have an SAT" ?

whyfi

Yeah, where's the midwest love for the ACT?! :x

teddyballgame

I have a totally ridiculous work schedule that prevents me from volunteering, but I have been tutoring for the SATs for about 7 years. I'd be glad to give someone copies of my materials and such if anyone wants them - mostly obvious stuff, but I have a few copies of recent tests (that aren't in the blue college board book), a packet of step-by-step, really dumb instructions, and a bunch of like sentence completion worksheets.

erikka

WhyFi wrote: Yeah, where's the midwest love for the ACT?! :x

WORD!

Not that I did particularly well on that, either--I was a half hour late, hungover, and never cracked the study book open and got a 22, just enough to get into college. Hooray for underacheivement. I cleaned up my act in college and ended up with a 3.5/3.85 in my major.

I'd be interested, but I'd guess those low scores knock me out of the running? I took the GREs last year and did okay so I'm not that far removed from the brutal world of standardized testing.

pensodyssey

I was going to have a great score, until the train coming from St. Louis derailed before meeting the one coming from Milwaukee.

carnivore

Look up at the survey results so far. There's a pretty nice bell curve developing here (skewed upwards of course for DH enthusiasts).

homeowner

Can I tell you that I am officially so old I don't remember? I know it was a good score because I stopped worrying about where I was going to go to school after the results came out, but it truly has flown out of my mind, along with all the other numbers that seemed so important when I was 17.

But I can still recall what the quadratic equation is...

cythren

Shouldn't any poll like this have separate categories for those who took expensive SAT prep courses prior to the test, and those who didn't?

I took it way back in 1989. My preparation was to buy an SAT study book from the bookstore and go through it alone at home. I still did OK though :-)

carnivore

homeowner wrote: But I can still recall what the quadratic equation is...

Me too! And I know pi to a thousand places...

cythren

You and Weird Al :-)

carnivore

cythren wrote: Shouldn't any poll like this have separate categories for those who took expensive SAT prep courses prior to the test, and those who didn't?

I took it way back in 1989. My preparation was to buy an SAT study book from the bookstore and go through it alone at home. I still did OK though :-)

I took it the same year as you, before they "recentered" the exam a few years ago, which made the higher numbers now mean much less than they used to. I took one practice test but otherwise took the thing cold. 8)

shishkab

Carnivore wrote:
I took it the same year as you, before they "recentered" the exam a few years ago, which made the higher numbers now mean much less than they used to. I took one practice test but otherwise took the thing cold. 8)

oh goodness, is THAT why i felt like a proverbial idiot? i took the exam in '88, got a 1200, and thought that was a decent score. then i saw all the scores people were saying they got i suddenly felt like the dumb kid sitting in the back of the room. i feel a bit better now, thanks. :oops:

carnivore

shishkab wrote: [quote=Carnivore]
I took it the same year as you, before they "recentered" the exam a few years ago, which made the higher numbers now mean much less than they used to. I took one practice test but otherwise took the thing cold. 8)

oh goodness, is THAT why i felt like a proverbial idiot? i took the exam in '88, got a 1200, and thought that was a decent score. then i saw all the scores people were saying they got i suddenly felt like the dumb kid sitting in the back of the room. i feel a bit better now, thanks. :oops:
They added about 80 points to the average verbal score and 20 points to the average math score.

Here are a few articles about it:
http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=10837
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/liveonline/01/metro/metro_oreilly082801.htm

And a study from the College Board justifying the change (NOTE: you won't understand this study if you got less than a 750 on the math SAT... on the pre-re-centered test):
http://ftp.ets.org/pub/res/researcher/RR-02-04-Dorans.pdf#search=%22recentering%20%20SAT%22

rose

cythren wrote:

I took it way back in 1989. My preparation was to buy an SAT study book from the bookstore and go through it alone at home. I still did OK though :-)

Way back, huh? I took it in 1983; I don't even know if there were expensive prep courses back then, but I definitely didn't take one. I had a practice book that I didn't look at. Luckily it was early enough in the day that I wasn't stoned. :roll: I did well enough to get into Gigantic State University, which was the extent of my ambitions.

doctorj

Carnivore wrote: They added about 80 points to the average verbal score and 20 points to the average math score.

The market keeps demanding smarter and smarter people with higher and higher qualifications, so schools make the numbers bigger. So what we really want to hear is the Net Present Value of your SAT score, i.e. adjusted for inflation. If you had invested in taking the test when it was first introduced in 1901, compound interest could give you a phenomenal score.

I guess if I only found out what an SAT is today, I shouldn't be coaching...

jamzer

I have to call bullshit on a lot of people here. I got 1100 back in 1986 and that was something like 80th percentile (if I remember right). Not genius level, but not bad either. I've heard of grade inflation, but this is crazy!

carnivore

Jamzer wrote: I have to call bullshit on a lot of people here. I got 1100 back in 1986 and that was something like 80th percentile (if I remember right). Not genius level, but not bad either. I've heard of grade inflation, but this is crazy!

People who spend time on a message board like this aren't exactly a random sampling of the population. I don't think it's that surprising. Especially since there are a lot of people here who probably took the test after 1995, which boosted their scores by about 100 points. I don't think there's much reason for anyone to lie in an anonymous survey.

escap

Carnivore wrote: [quote=Jamzer]I have to call bullshit on a lot of people here. I got 1100 back in 1986 and that was something like 80th percentile (if I remember right). Not genius level, but not bad either. I've heard of grade inflation, but this is crazy!

People who spend time on a message board like this aren't exactly a random sampling of the population. I don't think it's that surprising. Especially since there are a lot of people here who probably took the test after 1995, which boosted their scores by about 100 points. I don't think there's much reason for anyone to lie in an anonymous survey.

True, we brooklynians are uncommonly smart, apparently. However, it's also the case that around 1995 (give or take a year) the scoring was changed in a way that basically raised all scores. So an 1,100 in 1986 would be equivalent to a 1,200 or something like htat in 1996. Hopefully that'll help you sleep at night.

medusa

I don't completely remember. It was a long time ago (1985). I seem to recall the number 1250 and having felt that if I broke 1200, I could probably get in where I wanted to go (Haverford). I went to a very small school which tried to prep us for the test, but didn't have very great ambitions for us. I remember being told later (in college) that my score was unimpressive. I also recall that my little brother did better than I did when he took them 6 years later. But he was always very talented with those standardized tests.

I've had a lot of standarized tests since the SAT that I remember better and that caused much more agita (is that how you spell it?).

emily

Medusa wrote: agita (is that how you spell it?).

Yes.

Another scoring irregularity is between the math and verbal sections. On the math section, you can get multiple questions wrong and still get an 800. On the verbal section, you get points deducted disproportionately from 800 (or really 600 because it's 200-800) at the top of the scale. So if there are 60 questions you'd think they'd each be worth 10 points, and you'd get a 790 with one wrong, but actually they're worth more at that score so it gets bumped down to 780, or even 760 for two wrong.

I have no idea why this is, but it's why you hear of people getting 800s on the math section so much more than on the verbal.

(Disclaimer: this was true when I took it, just before the dreaded recentering. I have no idea what changes they've made--didn't they add a third section?)

alafairnadia

I took the SAT in 91/92 and tutored students in my high school to help them get scores necessary for scholarships, etc. so I got a pretty high score because I had to learn how to "beat" the test. so I am skewing score tallys. now, not sure what I'd get - I forgot all the tricks I learned, though they sorta kicked in when I took the LSAT on 1 hour of sleep.

carnivore

The single best thing you can do is read a lot. Fast readers have much more time to actually think about all the questions. For this reason, good reading skills actually even help with the math section.

escap

escap wrote: True, we brooklynians are uncommonly smart, apparently. However, it's also the case that around 1995 (give or take a year) the scoring was changed in a way that basically raised all scores. So an 1,100 in 1986 would be equivalent to a 1,200 or something like htat in 1996. Hopefully that'll help you sleep at night.

Oops, it's been brought to my attention that this has already been stated on this thread a few times. Well, this time with emphasis! Obviously I didn't bother reading many of the posts. :oops:

alafairnadia

Carnivore wrote: The single best thing you can do is read a lot. Fast readers have much more time to actually think about all the questions. For this reason, good reading skills actually even help with the math section.

reading doesn't really help. targeted reading does. of course, all the tricks I knew/used/taught were about boosting scores to from around a 600-700 to a 900-1000. pattern recognition was much more important. bear in mind, of course, that all of my knowledge is pre-95.

drano

What? No 1600's yet?

It seems odd now - even to me - but I remember having zero nervousness or urgency regarding the SAT. Not because I'm such a cool customer, mind you, but because I honestly didn't realize how important it was. The majorty of my classmates had no intention of going to college, so nobody was really talking about it or getting a competitive vibe going. Even if I had known there was such a thing as a prep course, there sure as hell wasn't going to be one near me. I at least knew I had to take it, though, so I did...spring of junior year, IIRC. Anyhow, the next fall a teacher or maybe a guidance counselor asked me if I wanted to take it again and I was all, "WTF? Why would I want to do that?" Ha! I also remember thinking that they probably got a piece of the test fee if they could talk me into it!

Ah, Maine - sometimes I miss it. But on the other hand, I'll wager you could find a prep course near my old town now.

rogersma

When I took the SAT long ago I also needed to take a couple of the advanced placement tests, in physics and chemistry (where top score was also 800). But they made you buy three, no matter how many you wanted to take. So I decided to stick around and, as an experiment, take the Hebrew test. I'd grown up in the southern California high desert, and at that age I probably wasn't even sure who it was who spoke Hebrew. So I just tried to do pattern matching and guess-work, and ended up with a score in the mid-600s. Never trusted those SAT tests since.

carnivore

rogersma wrote: When I took the SAT long ago I also needed to take a couple of the advanced placement tests, in physics and chemistry (where top score was also 800). But they made you buy three, no matter how many you wanted to take. So I decided to stick around and, as an experiment, take the Hebrew test. I'd grown up in the southern California high desert, and at that age I probably wasn't even sure who it was who spoke Hebrew. So I just tried to do pattern matching and guess-work, and ended up with a score in the mid-600s. Never trusted those SAT tests since.

The top score was 800 on the "Achievement Tests" (now called the SAT subject tests). The top score on the AP tests was 5.

Standardized test-taking skills are totally transferable between subjects, and your grade often reflects little about your knowledge of the subjects themselves. I remember taking a practice physics Regents exam when I was in 7th grade and hadn't taken physics. I got an 80.

isla

I have the time to help, but I took the ACT. I did very well on the ACT, but I am not sure how they compare.

I think I did the SAT as a sophmore, but I cannot remember how I did.