It’s worth noting that the SAT2 (subject tests) are much more rarely taken; while all students who anticipate tertiary schooling in the US take the SAT, only a relative handful take the SAT2 (or did when I was looking at it). My 740 in math (SAT1) was substantially higher percentile than my 790 in the SAT2 math subject test
I also thought that the College Board’s claim that the SAT 1 is not an IQ test was really odd. The test is (or was, in 2004/2005) full of the following categories of problem:
1) Things a reasonably competent high school math student could solve, if they took the time, but the answers were widely spaced (say, by order of magnitude) and you could figure out the only possible one of those near-instantly if you knew to filter for it instead of for the exact solution.
2) Problems like the example given above, where no education past second grade (generously) is needed to actually solve the problem; it’s just a matter of how quickly you can figure out what it’s asking and how to best determine that.
3) Problems that could be solved, relatively easily but slowly, the “long” way, or that could be solved quickly if you knew the trick.
4) Problems that look complicated, but where getting the answers only requires solving a much simpler subset of the full problem.
None of the three actually test your knowledge of math as a subject, really. #3 is the only type you might reasonably expect to have learned the optimal technique from a teacher, unless your teacher was specifically preparing you for the SAT. A common trend of all of them is that time is of the essence; while some people might genuinely be unable to solve a few of the problems, most of them would just take too long if done the simplest or most straightforward way, and you’d run out of time. The trick was to figure out how to solve each problem quickly, whether because the problem fit a pattern with a quickly-solvable solution, or because the solution required novel thought rather than merely plugging values into a formula, or because the test basically gives you the answer if you know how to spot it.
The subject tests (I did math, physics, and writing) were much more like a classroom test, where actual knowledge of the subject was being tested. You still had to be quick, but the questions were much less likely to be “you can solve this in 10 seconds or 3 minutes, depending on what you do” and more likely to be “you hopefully know the formula for this, so solve it as fast as you can!”
As other people have said, I look forward to reading the rest of this series. I’m surprised this isn’t a promoted post...
It’s worth noting that the SAT2 (subject tests) are much more rarely taken; while all students who anticipate tertiary schooling in the US take the SAT, only a relative handful take the SAT2 (or did when I was looking at it). My 740 in math (SAT1) was substantially higher percentile than my 790 in the SAT2 math subject test
I also thought that the College Board’s claim that the SAT 1 is not an IQ test was really odd. The test is (or was, in 2004/2005) full of the following categories of problem: 1) Things a reasonably competent high school math student could solve, if they took the time, but the answers were widely spaced (say, by order of magnitude) and you could figure out the only possible one of those near-instantly if you knew to filter for it instead of for the exact solution. 2) Problems like the example given above, where no education past second grade (generously) is needed to actually solve the problem; it’s just a matter of how quickly you can figure out what it’s asking and how to best determine that. 3) Problems that could be solved, relatively easily but slowly, the “long” way, or that could be solved quickly if you knew the trick. 4) Problems that look complicated, but where getting the answers only requires solving a much simpler subset of the full problem.
None of the three actually test your knowledge of math as a subject, really. #3 is the only type you might reasonably expect to have learned the optimal technique from a teacher, unless your teacher was specifically preparing you for the SAT. A common trend of all of them is that time is of the essence; while some people might genuinely be unable to solve a few of the problems, most of them would just take too long if done the simplest or most straightforward way, and you’d run out of time. The trick was to figure out how to solve each problem quickly, whether because the problem fit a pattern with a quickly-solvable solution, or because the solution required novel thought rather than merely plugging values into a formula, or because the test basically gives you the answer if you know how to spot it.
The subject tests (I did math, physics, and writing) were much more like a classroom test, where actual knowledge of the subject was being tested. You still had to be quick, but the questions were much less likely to be “you can solve this in 10 seconds or 3 minutes, depending on what you do” and more likely to be “you hopefully know the formula for this, so solve it as fast as you can!”
As other people have said, I look forward to reading the rest of this series. I’m surprised this isn’t a promoted post...