Most smart people I know got a 'good' (say, better than ~1400ish) score on the SAT. I can't tell the difference between someone I work with who got a 1450 and a 1550 though (unless they tell me, of course).
Most smart people I know also got a better than ~1400ish score on the SAT, but a disproportionate number are also in the near perfect range (~1570-1600). I can definitely tell the difference between a 1400 and a 1570, and can usually tell the difference between a 1570 and 1600.
I find myself very skeptical of your last claim. According to the research my friends and I did when taking the SATs, the difference between a 1570 or 1580 and 1600 was often a single question.
The scoring scale varied a bit based on the difficulty of the particular exam you sat, and as we were aiming for scores near the top of the scale we hoped to get an exam that allowed a question or two wrong to still get a 1600. Often one question wrong on verbal would still score 800, math was less forgiving of a single mistake.
I have trouble believing there could be any distinguishable difference in practice between the population of students who got two questions wrong on the exam and those who got one wrong.
There's fairly little difference between someone who gets two questions wrong on the exam and someone who got one wrong. There's usually a fairly large difference between someone who gets two wrong and someone who got them all right.
On the modern (post-1995) SAT, 1600 is a fairly wide range, from people who got 1-3 questions wrong to people who breezed through the whole test, double-checked everything, and didn't miss a single question. If you're talking to one of the latter, you'll know it.
Exactly. This is what Craig means when he says he got a perfect score when it meant perfect -- he got all the questions right.
For example, I took one of the SATs of that era (before antonyms were removed), missed only one question on the math section but still got a mere 770. I got over it.
If I were to send you my resume (sans test scores), do you think you could guess whether I got a 1570 or a 1600? Or is it something you can only tell from personal interaction?
It's from working on a project with someone or sharing a class with them. If you have a casual conversation or quickly glance at a resume, it's quite easy to miscategorize. But if you're working with someone day-in-and-day out for 3 months or so, you figure out pretty quickly who knows their stuff and who's just pretending.
I suppose it's possible that someone could know their stuff and yet have bombed the SAT (if, say, they went to a rock concert the night before), or they could've aced the SAT and through sheer lazyness prove to be utterly useless. But the skills that make you do well on the SAT - quick reasoning, good short-term memory, a decent-sized store of background knowledge, and an eye toward detail that makes you go back and double-check your answers - tend to make them perform very well at a project as well. That's why people use the SAT: it may not be intelligence, but it correlates very well with it.
Are you serious? If you did that well on the SAT, surely you see the fallacy implicit in your comment. But just in case, I'll spell it out - I can't imagine any justification for the assumption that the ordering of people by the degree to which they "know their stuff" is the same as the ordering of them by SAT score. I'm sure there's a correlation, but what you said requires something far stronger. You may not have meant it in such a precise sense, but even in that case I think my objection actually still applies.
This just seems unlikely. The difference between 100 points at the top end of the scale is minute -- a few problems swing -- and the change in a 1570 to 1600 is quite literally an issue of missing just a couple problems in either section.
The SAT is a horribly noisy measure of excellent in either verbal skills or math, much less actual intelligence. I can tell you I managed to never peak over 700 on the math section only to get a perfect score on both the Math IIC and GRE Math sections (much harder tasks).
The Math IIC is easier than than the SAT-I-M, but requires more subject knowledge. They test different things: the SAT-I is primarily a speed test, measuring how quickly you can reason under pressure, while the SAT-II is primarily a content test, measuring how much you've managed to cram into your brain before taking it.
