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Yes but no one takes the writing portion as a real measure of anything concerning scholastic ability and its the most coach-able part of the test and even back when I was taking it a 200 point difference was taken to be no guarantee of differing levels of academic ability.

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The difference has been hundreds of points since long before the merging of the writing test into the SAT. And yes, a 200 point difference is, and always has been, a large difference. I think the standard deviation is generally in the ballpark of 120 points.

They rescaled the test in 1990 so that the std deviation would be 200 points. So if that's the case that's really odd.

2014 statistics ( http://research.collegeboard.org/content/sat-data-tables ) say:

SD for verbal is 115, math is 120. This must have been what I was thinking of. SD for overall (V+M) score is 218. The overall SD is much more relevant here, but let's note that a difference of one standard deviation is still a very large difference.

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