i always hear people saying if you took the SAT before X year add 100 to your score for your modern score. why did the grading or whatever change? like why aren’t they the same anymore
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The scores are normalized.
Once upon a time, only kids going to college took the SAT, they were the top 40% of the “smartest kids”. Today everybody seems to want to go to college, so maybe 80% of kids take the test. The added kids aren’t the top 40% because, math. This would pull the average down, but normalization fixes that.
A 780 Math score from 1960 is the same as a 780 math today, top 0.5% of the students that took the test, and those students would have taken the test in 1960 also so the result is really the same. Similarly, a 600 math means something similar statistically, but many of the students that get 600 wouldn’t have taken the test in 1960, so the math proficiency of someone who got 600 in 1960 might be reflective of someone who got 680 today.
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