I was on the receiving end of that myself. It was quite crushing.
AQ makes it sound like he was in HS before that time.
I looked up the recentering conversion and 730 verbal and 780 math became 800s. I guess I would have gotten a 1580 if I’d taken it one year later.
All I’m really saying is that getting into a hyper selective school requires the admissions people to be actively wow-ed about something in your file, and you’re not going to dazzle an Ivy League admissions officer on academics with a 1550 SAT. You certainly won’t get dinged for it and it’s probably a solid plus, but it’s not going to make your case.
Yeah, to really impress them you have to be able to write a seven figure check.
Wait what? You can miss a question on the SAT and get a perfect score? If true this is some bullshit
I worked with a physics professor who would say that a test anyone gets a perfect score on is not a good test. I don’t know for sure but suspect 100% of his colleagues would have agreed.
I’m generally against testing so fuck all this bullshit.
The signal gets clipped when lots of people get the max score. I once had a prof who made a very convincing argument that the mean grade of exams should always be 50%.
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That’s what my pchem classes were like, I enjoyed it because all the premed kids that were going the hard science route complained a bunch.
That’s basically what he said. But I don’t think it applied on the low end, as he was probably fine with somebody getting zero. The main thing was to be able to give prospective employers an accurate measure of the quality of the product. Evaluating students’ worth gave him great satisfaction.
That was the big change when they recentered. Used to be only way to get 1600 was to be perfect, but they decided to make it a lot easier.
It’s almost impossible to get a zero though on a physics test - unless the prof is just cruel. I was a physics grader for two years in college (grading freshman physics when I was junior/senior) and even if students got a problem wrong, they’d get a few points just for setting even part of the problem up right. So even if you got every problem wrong, you wouldn’t get a zero unless you truly knew nothing.
You can be absent. Automatic zero.
Edit: sorry, just thinking about that guy pisses me off.
Class participation grades are the worst and should not be allowed. If you can learn the material from the textbook without going to class, that shouldn’t be an issue. Class participation is just a way for professors to stroke their own egos and pretend that they are great teachers and that it’s imperative you bask in their wisdom during class if you want to truly understand the material.
Did you study in a group for pchem? I took a pchem class and half-assed my way to a solid C all by myself. I think I did college wrong because I never ever collaborated with others unless it was some assigned group project.
I’ve also never really done in-depth studying with other people for poker, which I am sure has limited my success.
I’m basically telling you all that I’m fucked up because I spent my formative years in a relentless quest to know everything and didn’t learn how to interact with people.
I knew someone who got to retake a midterm for a physics intro-level class because the prof made it so hard that the average score was 20-ish.
I checked what my score would be after recentering and I still didn’t do very well.
claiming intro classes need to average 50-60% always pissed me off. The point of these classes shouldn’t be to differentiate between geniuses and smart people. The point should be to teach the curriculum that they’re limited to, not to stretch way beyond it or make the class about something else (like remembering an obscure trig identity to do a problem or whatever)
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For schools that do letter grades, does it matter what number corresponds to what letter if they’re grading on a curve?
And some people could do with a life lesson that sometimes 50% is maximum efficiency.
Oddly, the daughter of one of my bosses got into Berkeley but was rejected from Florida.
I mean I barely studied, got a 1210 on my SAT, 3.7 weighted GPA, some extracurriculars and got into Penn State in 2003. And apparently that’s a top 100 university in the world according to QS.
With those scores, I probably wouldn’t make it to my safety school these days.
This person who is probably gonna use Harvard for affirmative action stuff is way smarter and harder working than me.
When I took inorganic chemistry in college, I got some ridiculously low score on the first test, like a 21 or something, so I panicked and switched to pass/fail. Then I ended up getting an A 