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Comment by uglycoyote | Hacker News Reader

has the SAT gotten way easier on recent decades or have students just gotten that much smarter or better at taking it, and universities gotten a lot stricter about accepting students with lower scores?

one of the commenters in the linked article mentions that their son, with an SAT score of over 1500, was rejected by a number of normal state universities such as the University of Texas at Austin (a great school but not like an ivy league exclusive school)

in 1995 I went to university of Texas, they had a policy of automatically accepting anyone with a score over 1200 without any additional requirements. many of my peers were accepted with far lower scores. Now, according to collegesomply.com, the average SAT score for students at University of Texas is 1350

I haven't really been following the evolution of this test, but have scores risen dramatically over the last could decades, and why?

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I don't have a good answer to your question here are some results from a quick google search:

https://blog.prepscholar.com/average-sat-scores-over-time

I think a sometimes-easy-to-overlook factor is that many state flagship institutions like UT-Austin have a strong bias or preference for in-state applicants. Famously, I remember being told that out-of-state applicants to my state's big, somewhat well-known, public university needed better credentials than highly selective private institutions required/recommended . . .

This is a good answer.

UT Austin in particular used to automatically accept anyone whose GPA was in the top 10% of their school for in state applicants, regardless of that school's performance. It was meant to give people from different calibers of schools from across the state a fair chance, since school quality would inevitably affect test scores.

Now, it looks like the top 6%: https://admissions.utexas.edu/apply/decisions

Kids are applying to more schools today than in the past (pre Covid study) https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/04/09/a-majority-... It could be with the higher applications that just means the 1200 score naturally migrated higher, they really could not accept the same number of students at that score.

I had something like that commenter's score in the 1980's and was offered scholarships for four years for public universities in Texas and both gave me a private pre high school graduation tour so maybe the other criteria for this particular student (extracurricular activities, school scores, rank) were not comparable or that is just a random internet troll (disqus is particularly easy to spam based on other websites I've seen use it or maybe that's just the ubiquity of disqus, although it would not load for me:) ).

Sat scoring was “recentered” in 1996, causing a significant jump in average score.

It matters to what degree you are applying too. The average SAT score will vary by school (I think the School of Engineering is the highest and the College of Natural Sciences the second) and by major. UT has a top 10 CS program and will only accept a certain number of out-of-state residents. We would have to know the academic achievements of the out-of-state residents applying to the CS program to say if anything funny is going on here.

IIRC scores actually went down for a while, as some schools/states were mandating or heavily encouraging students to take the SAT. That made the test-taking pool less self-selective, so it now includes more students who are less prepared for the test.

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