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Comment by sam0x17 | Hacker News Reader

Yes. Case in point, the daughter of the lady in my town who ran the SAT and SSAT prep courses got all 800s. ALL 800s. She was smart, but not that smart. It is possible to be completely prepared for the SATs.

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A perfect score on the modern SAT is not very impressive. The bar has been lowered considerably in the last 40 years.

[edit: seems I was very clearly wrong about this]

With respect, what in the world are you talking about? A casual search on the topic shows that 2 million people took the SAT last year. Of those 2 million, fewer than 500 achieved a perfect score.

Being part of the 0.025% isn't impressive to you?

Yes. False memory on my part it seems. I was very clearly wrong. The current SAT is clearly selective enough for my very popular scheme.

Ah, there it is. The "this generation has it so much easier" mentality.

Got any citations to back this up? Or just feel like grousing about millennials?

Nope. Seems I was wrong.

Isn't the difficulty tuned to produce a histogram close to that of a normal distribution? Yes it's true that the contents of the test have changed (removing analogies, and then recently circa 2016 revamping the writing/reading sections to be more like the ACT) but fundamentally it doesn't really look that different to me. In fact if anything now the reading section relies more on understanding and analysis of passages rather than just memorizing words and definitions which if anything seems like slightly raising the bar.

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