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Could we look at average SAT scores by year as a proxy? It's not a great metric because not all students take the SAT but I think there's some correlation. https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-over-time

I don't have a good answer to your question here are some results from a quick google search: https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-over-time I think a sometimes-easy-to-overlook factor is that many state flagship institutions like UT-Austin have a strong bias or preference for in-state applicants. Famously, I remember being told that out-of-state applicants to my state's big, somewhat well-known, public university needed better credentials than highly selective private institutions required/recommended . . .

Seconding this. The former Writing section was not just the essay: it also had multiple-choice questions. Effectively, the essay itself was worth between 100 and 200 points, and the multiple-choice made up the rest. https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-score-chart-raw-score-conversion-to-s…

I don’t know your situation. Even a perfect 1600 isn’t enough by itself to get you into top 5 schools. https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-scores-for-colleges The highest average SAT score at the top schools is right around 1500. I’m not saying a 1500 will get you into Harvard. It won’t. But it will get you into a very good school. University of Washington is a great school. It’s average SAT score is just 1340. 75th percentile is 1460. 1500 is literally top 2% of score distribution. For most circumstances that should get most people into a top 5% school. (Top 5%, not Top 5).

As another Spaniard I agree with you. But degrees about tourism can get you a job here. As I am learning English, I would suggest: Use "at length",don't repeat finish so many times, finish (complete, get, achieve) a degree, become pointless (become less valuable, worthless), which (that) is what I now best. About grade inflation in the US: http://www.gradeinflation.com/, https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-college-gpa-by-major it seems that Grade inflation is more rampant in non-STEM fields because assignments are usually more open to interpretation,

You can often tell someone's age by whether or not they know analogies in this format. It used to be a staple of standardized testing on logical deduction. A : B :: C : D Is read as A is to B as C is to D. The reader is meant to understand the relationship between A and B and how it's similar to the relationship between C and D. An easy one might be, basketball : hoop :: hockey puck : net But they can get quite challenging. And with multiple choice answers present in standardized testing, you often have to understand the complex relationships between many abstract concepts, and evaluate that the abstractions are of a similar type or degree. They're actually kind of fun. Here's an example taken from [1] (the source also has excellent discussion as to why they were removed) : PALTRY : SIGNIFICANCE :: A. redundant : discussion B. austere : landscape C. opulent : wealth D. oblique : familiarity E. banal : originality Pick the correct answer A-E. [1] https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-analogies-and-comparisons-why-removed…

Average in statistics contains the following mean, median, mode, range and more. This (Not trying to be mean or saying you are trying to do this) pseudo-intelligent attack on average because they heard a cool attack on mean when it comes to income inequality isn't pertinent to speaking about above and bellow average. Real world example: It is still an non-measurable skill set. > so the distribution would still be skewed and the average would still be different from the median value You also mixing up vocabulary your still taking average = mean BUT average also means median. Here is real world ranking of skills (Math, Science, English and Reading) http://blog.prepscholar.com/act-percentiles-and-score-rankings Once again what scores are you comparing? When I went to Graduate School I had to do GRE and MAT test and I needed to be over 70% percentile on the test just to be average in my field of study (Theology (highest of all fields of study while Education had one of the lowest scores which makes me laugh) This had HUGE implications on my later PhD program acceptance. I couldn't say I was above average in my field because I scored really high. I had to be better then well over 75% of the people taking the test in my field of study. Just because there are a ton of beginners that start and leave that doesn't mean that there isn't a middle and that middle ground will have great skills above the learners. I counter the argument on this paper discounting average developers…

This is a problem with some tests. The students may detect a pattern in the test answers which reflects the work of those generating the answers, not the content. See this article on SAT test prep.[1] The requirement that only one answer can be right means that wrong answers have easily identifiable properties. [1] https://blog.prepscholar.com/the-critical-fundamental-strategy-of-sat-…

Actually, a number of states require students to the SAT. [1] This has an interesting effect on the average SAT scores, since the pool of students who choose to take the SAT tend to have somewhat higher testing ability than the students who would not have chosen to take it (but end up taking it due to state mandates). 1: https://blog.prepscholar.com/which-states-require-the-sat

Wrong. https://blog.prepscholar.com/how-many-people-get-a-34-35-36-on-the-act… 36 = 4,100 students 35 = 12,000 students Slightly less than 50k. UMN app has no essay or anything like that. Your disbelief is your intuition which is that something here is wrong. In the words of Principal Skinner, "It must be the children."

https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-over-time Note that the SATs have been renormed a couple of times.

> Things got tense over the years when they realized we did it faster / better than they did. Having lived most of my life in the Midwest, and about six years in Silicon Valley, I had to agree with this. There are smart people everywhere, but I've found above-average intelligence is somehow common in the Twin Cities area. (I know that's mathematically problematic.) There are a lot of unusually smart people living in the Twin Cities. I didn't know that was weird until I lived elsewhere. EDIT: A source with some imperfect data: https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-by-state-most-recent And this, which puts Minnesota's average IQ at #5 and North Dakota at #3 among the 50 states: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/average-iq-by-state

Personally, I'd say "weird subjects" - or, if not weird, not marketable. The proverbial "basket weaving" degree or stuff like that. I think the more common "liberal arts" line as well. https://blog.prepscholar.com/worst-college-majors https://www.salary.com/passages/8-college-degrees-with-the-worst-retur… https://www.ownyourownfuture.com/most-useless-degrees/ What I find interesting in these articles (and others) is CompSci is listed as a bad investment... oversaturation and what not.

It’s definitely more common than Gates. Perhaps around 5% of Ivy League students - https://blog.prepscholar.com/how-much-do-college-donations-help-colleg…

There are combined BS/MD programs in the US, which I think take around 6 years to complete: https://blog.prepscholar.com/ba-md-bs-md-programs-list So that’s only one year longer than the UK system, and if you wanted to get a BSc and and MD (MBBS) degree in England, it would take you 6 years there too.

Charter Cities sounds like the old Open Door policy but with extra steps https://blog.prepscholar.com/what-was-the-open-door-policy-china

> if a 23 was a good ASVAB score For those of us not familiar with the US military, it appears the answer is "no, that's not a good score". Apparently it's a percentile: they did better than 23% of the test takers, and it looks like that wouldn't qualify you to join any branch of the US military. https://blog.prepscholar.com/good-asvab-score-air-force-army

I think it is safe to assume that the author is super good at reading comprehension. The SAT [1] scores of MIT students seem to be in the top 5% of population [2]. [1] https://www.prepscholar.com/sat/s/colleges/MIT-SAT-scores-GPA [2] https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-percentiles-and-score-rankings

I had to Google for the 'infamous letter C'. In case others were wondering, it seems to stem from folk wisdom still perpetuated that for a blind guess the third answer when given 4 or more options in a multiple choice test is more likely to be correct than the others. The linked article suggests this does not hold (for the ACT), but doe suggest picking a single letter and sticking with it for all blind guesses would outperform a purely random guessing strategy. https://blog.prepscholar.com/most-common-answer-on-act

99th percentile is "didn't score well" nowadays? (going by the 2018 charts - the ones from when you were presumably in high school are out of 2400 - and in 2012 the cutoff for 99th percentile was 2210/2400 [0]) 0: https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-historical-percentiles-for-2014-2013-…

As a native english speaker, the earlier phrase ("tantivy is to toshi as lucene is to elastic search") is easier for me to understand. I find your phrase a bit harder to understand, but it looks like just the kind of reorganization other languages do structure wise -- I don't know how to express it in proper grammatical terms, but the way the prepositions are swapped around makes it seem like native english words but with a non-english structure. It might have to do with the use of Analogy questions in the SAT (a standardized test all but required for high school students wanting to attend good colleges in America), though it looks like they've been removed?[0]. "_____ is to ___ as ____ is to ______" was the verbatim format of those test questions. [0]: https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-analogies-and-comparisons-why-removed…

I think what you are missing is "base rate neglect." Let's say the overall average GPA is 3 (or 3.1 for women): https://blog.prepscholar.com/whats-the-average-high-school-gpa Then you would expect that to swamp the information that this person was an early reader. You might let the early reader have a slight effect.

And yet the neighboring state of New Hampshire, which has some of the lowest taxes in the country (0% sales tax, 0% state income tax), beats Vermont handily in SAT scores. https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-and-act-scores-by-stated-adju… What does Vermont have to show for its higher spending? Why do you see higher spending as an automatically good thing if it doesn't have any evidence of having a beneficial effect?

Most of the data is already public: https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-scores-by-high-school-and-district

Here's a site that calls 3+ passing - http://blog.prepscholar.com/average-ap-scores-for-every-ap-exam Anecdotally when I took them 14 years ago 3+ was considered passing, and most mid-level schools took 3+ for credit except for things they specialized in, with higher tier schools requiring 4+ in more subjects. The AP Board has a school lookup and the few schools I looked at (a mix of big state schools and more elite private universities) seemed to bear this pattern out.

> cramming a bunch of relatively arbitrary information into your brain What? Most of the SAT is evaluating high school-level math, writing, and reading skills. It's not like they're asking you to memorize historical dates or names or poems or formulas. Maybe the relatively narrow part of the test on vocabulary falls into this category, but even those words are almost entirely things you'll just pick up if you like reading books. And, now that I'm looking into it, only 10 out of 52 questions in the reading section are even about vocabulary [1]. You can skip 9 of them and still get a 700 on reading/writing [2]. Assuming you get an 800 on math, that's a 98th percentile total score and a 90th percentile on reading/writing alone [3], with almost no vocabulary prep. I agree about the high pressure aspect, there doesn't seem to be a good way around that. [1] https://www.kaptest.com/study/sat/whats-tested-on-the-sat-vocabulary/ [2] https://blog.prepscholar.com/how-many-questions-can-you-skip-for-a-goo… [3] https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-percentiles-and-score-rankings

> I'm sorry if I don't put much trust in third hand stories like this, it's easy for them to be blown out of proportion. Fair enough, but consider the new SAT "Adversity" score[1]. Is that not essentially the same thing, but on a larger scale? It's still reducing the "vector" that oppression is supposed to be (from an intersectionality perspective) to a "scalar" value that is useful for sorting people into a hierarchy. With regard to my first point, consider the NYT opinion piece arguing against the Adversity score[2]. The author spends the first two paragraphs establishing his own adversity/lack of privilege before he begins to actually make an argument. I don't think there's anything wrong with him doing so, and I think it's rhetorically effective, but do you think his opinion would be given a platform if he did not have that adversity score? > My experiences, as a cis-het-white-affluent person would disagree. ;) Perhaps because you benefit from (in Paul Graham's words) "orthodox privilege"? That is, your ideas are not questioned on the basis of your identity because they are the "right" opinions[3]. For someone to question the orthodoxy, they must first establish their own adversity or risk being discounted (or worse). --- [1]https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-adversity-score Curiously, a '0' means "most hardship" and a "100" means "least hardship", which is the inverse of what you would…