Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

When Close Is Perfect: Even 4 Errors Can't Prevent Top Score on New S.A.T.

When Close Is Perfect: Even 4 Errors Can't Prevent Top Score on New S.A.T.
Credit...The New York Times Archives
See the article in its original context from
July 26, 1995, Section B, Page 6Buy Reprints
TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers.
About the Archive
This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online publication in 1996. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them.
Occasionally the digitization process introduces transcription errors or other problems; we are continuing to work to improve these archived versions.

It sounds like one of those impenetrable, imponderable word problems on the S.A.T.: If a standardized test has 138 questions and a test taker gets 3 or 4 wrong, can he or she still get a perfect score?

The answer: Yes. On the S.A.T. itself.

A perfect score of 1600 -- 800 on the math part of the Scholastic Assessment Test, 800 on the verbal part -- used to be the college-bound test taker's Everest. Generations grew up believing that nothing was higher. There still is not, and 137 of the high school students who slogged through the S.A.T. in April boldly went where only a few had gone before, scoring 1600. Only 25 did that well in all of 1994, when a perfect score meant answering every question correctly. No mistakes allowed.

But that April test was something new and different. For the first time in the 69-year history of the S.A.T., a time-honored assessment for college admissions, a student could miss as many as four questions, or 3 percent, and still get a 1600.

In an age when commuter trains are not counted as late unless they are more than five minutes behind schedule and chickens are considered fresh even if they are still frozen as solid as a bowling ball, all this sounds like New Math at the College Board, which sponsors the S.A.T.

And in fact, it is. The College Board recalibrated its scores so the average student would once again get scores of 500 on both the math and verbal sections, starting with the April S.A.T. In effect, the College Board was correcting for five decades of declining scores. The average verbal score had fallen to 424, or 76 points below the benchmark of 500; the average math score, 478. The recalibration was intended to add about 100 points to the typical test taker's score, 80 on the verbal and 20 on the math.

But the recalibration -- known among educators as "recentering" -- also perfected what passes for perfection on the S.A.T.

Bradley J. Quin, the director of admissions and enrollment services at the College Board, said the old scoring system had slipped so far off center that test takers who got every question right might have ended up with only a 760 or a 770 on the verbal part of the test.

Mr. Quin attributed this to an algorithm used to translate the raw score -- the number of questions on the test minus the number of wrong answers -- into the make-or-break three-digit score. Complicating things was a little-known fact about the S.A.T.: 790's are never awarded. If a student does not score 800, Mr. Quin said, his score automatically dropped to 780 -- or less, depending on the version of the test taken.

"Folks' definition of the word 'perfect' had been inconsistent with what we were awarding," Mr. Quin said. "It was inappropriate to award a 760 to a student who had every question correct on the raw scale, so we dog-legged the scale up to an 800."

That change also helped near-perfect test takers -- a bit too much, some administrators say. Under the old scoring system, a student might have been docked 40 or 50 points for missing a single question, depending on the version of the test taken. Now he, too, can end up with an 800.

"We don't think a perfect raw score performance ipso facto means that only that student should get an 800," Mr. Quin said, "because the measurement quality of the test is not so fine as to say that if you got one wrong on one day, you are no different than somebody who got every one correct."

Still, the notion that a 97 percent performance rates a perfect score does not sit well with some administrators. "I'd like to think a perfect score indicates a perfect test, and not something less," said Wayne Beecraft, the executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers.

Some students, too, worry that the S.A.T. has been devalued. "There are an awful lot of older siblings saying, 'Nyah, nyah, nyah, I did better than you,' " said Daphne Rhodes of Rhodes Education Counseling in Princeton, N.J. "But they're comparing apples and oranges.

"The colleges will understand that, and will look to the academic record; they will look to the teacher recommendations; they will look to the essay; they will look to the nonacademic credentials that the student presents."

And, as Gretchen W. Rigol, the executive director of admissions and guidance services at the College Board noted, "The people who score 1600 now are still very much in the elite."

Fewer than 1 percent of test takers will end up with 1600's -- far fewer, but also far more than in the past. Under the old scoring procedures, 0.002 percent of students received a 1600 last year. In April, that figure surged to 0.07 percent.

That did not surprise some frequent critics of the S.A.T. "We always said this common yardstick was elastic," said Robert Schaeffer, the public education director of Fair Test, a nonprofit watchdog group in Cambridge, Mass. "This recentering makes it Silly Putty."

But some things have not changed about the S.A.T. Mr. Quin still advises against guessing blindly, because points are still deducted for wrong answers. But the Princeton Review, one of the nation's largest test-preparation companies, said the average score among 8,000 students it coached for the April test rose by 69 points to 1,231.

"A lot of kids are very happy with their scores right now based on April because if you look at the guidebooks the scores look great -- everyone's going to Harvard," said John S. Katzman, the founder of the Princeton Review. "But, of course, everybody else in the future will get higher scores, too, so a lot of kids are going to have some rethinking to do."

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 6 of the National edition with the headline: When Close Is Perfect: Even 4 Errors Can't Prevent Top Score on New S.A.T.. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT