He got 1600 (perfect score) on SATs.
I wonder what the relationship of SAT scores and highly successful people is.
I wonder what the relationship of SAT scores and highly successful people is.
You can see how the above could snowball into a huge advantage upon graduation from college. Any correlation you notice between high tests scores and successful people is most certainly a result of this property of our system and not from tests themselves. The tests could be targeted towards an arbitrary skill set and those who did well would still be more successful because the system values those who do well.
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.
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.
According to Wikipedia, SAT 1600 (post-1995) is 99.93 percentile, so about 1 in 1429 (3.4 standard deviations).
Given that there are millions of people taking SAT, in absolute numbers there should be plenty of people hitting the test ceiling.
Interestingly, pre-1995 apparently had much higher ceiling, with only 1 in 142,857 getting score above 1580 (4.6 standard deviations).
Which BTW means Microsoft was founded by some really crazy dudes.
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.
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).
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.
Suggests that he wouldn't believe there to be a direct correlation.
Anecdotally, Bill Gates and Paul Allen come to mind (I think one had perfect score and one just a tiny bit less).
Also Drew Houston of Dropbox put his perfect score on Y Combinator application (which pg put as an example of successful application despite Drew having dreaded single-founder handicap :).
I wonder if there'd be a stronger GRE*success correlation?