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Comment by the_watcher | Hacker News Reader

My immediate reaction: My score is now forever unrelatable to all except those who took the exam between 2005 and 2014. Not that anyone has asked my SAT score since I got into undergrad, but now a sizable group of people who did substantially poorer than me will seem as though they did extremely well (a 1550, for example, means something very different depending on which exam you took, while my score of above 1600 will immediate remind people I took the 2400 exam).

It doesn't affect me at all, and I'm not complaining, but that's what ran through my head.

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This is something that's been going on for a long time, something I watch as one who took the exam in 1979. Since then it's been successively watered down to the point it's much less useful. E.g. MIT now accepts the ACT ... and finds it's a better predictor than the SAT (!!!).

If you chop off the essay score, you'll still be related to everybody ever (with respect to test revisions).

Yes, I know. But if I got a 1500 on the new 2400 test, you could always just say you got a 1500. There's going to be some number of people who forget about the change and when it happened (people do it now, I doubt they'll forget less often now). However, you say a score above 2400 and everyone immediately remembers the change.

Again, I don't care about how this affects me, it's just the most interesting and relevant part to me.

Unlike alma maters or perhaps Xoogler status, I don't think SAT scores ever comes up casually in a conversation, and where it does I doubt someone scoring 1500/2400 would be mixed up for someone scoring 1500/1600.

I'm not really sure why SAT scores matter to anyone other than kids trying to get into their university of choice, other than some sort of bragging rights. I had some of the highest standardized test scores in the history of my high school, but I'm certainly not the most accomplished.

I haven't thought about mine since applying to college until this story came out. Just thought what ran through my head was interesting, not that it was a real problem for me.

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