But there’s another, much better reason to ignore the idea of an order of difficulty on the SAT. The College Board assigns difficulty levels to questions based on how well other students do against the questions—for example, if most other people get a question right, the College Board decides it’s an easy question. That means that the difficulty ranking assigned by the College Board has nothing to do with the specific concepts in the question, and assumes that you’re exactly like the average test-taker, which you aren’t. Most test-takers don’t know how the test works, and don’t know how important it is to read everything carefully. But you do know that. Most won’t read this Black Book. But you will. So you’re better prepared for the test than the people who are used to determine the difficulty ranking, which means you’re likely to find that the difficulty ranking becomes increasingly meaningless to you.
So there are two major flaws with the idea of the difficulty ranking. First, the College Board doesn’t present questions in a strict rank order. Second, and, more importantly, the ranking system it uses is meaningless to a well-trained test-taker anyway.
Fact: Any given SAT question might be easy or hard for you, regardless of whether it appears early or late in a group of questions.
Misinformation From Colleges
Believe it or not, colleges don’t know that much about the SAT, even though they are the driving force that keeps it a popular test. After all, the latest changes to the SAT, which have made it more beatable than it ever was, were made largely at the request of the California University System—who thought they were turning the test into a better tool for measuring college-readiness, a tool that would be almost impossible to game. So be careful about what colleges say when it comes to the SAT.
SAT Misconception 4: Colleges don’t care about the SAT.
I was actually taking a tour of Princeton years ago when someone asked the admissions rep giving the tour what Princeton thought of the SAT. He said that Princeton didn’t care at all about a student’s SAT score.
We asked him to repeat himself, and he said again that a student’s SAT score didn’t matter to Princeton at all.
Now, I’m not ready to say this guy was lying. He knows more about Princeton’s admissions process than I do. But let’s look at some facts from Princeton’s own data.
Princeton’s own fact sheet for a recent entering class shows that the middle 50% of those admitted for that year were in the top 1 percentile of all SAT-takers. That’s awfully coincidental for a school that doesn’t care about SAT scores, isn’t it?
In addition, Princeton (like almost every other reputable school in America) takes the trouble of requiring students to submit SAT scores in the first place. Given that roughly 15,000 students apply to Princeton in a given year, let’s assume that it takes an average of one minute for someone to receive a score report in an application, process it for review, and pass it along to a decision-maker for final consideration in conjunction with the rest of an application (probably a low estimate, but go with me here). That would mean that Princeton spends approximately 250 hours every admissions cycle—basically a month and a half of 40-hour work weeks for one employee—gathering data that it doesn’t care about. Does that make any sense to you?
I’m only using Princeton as one example here. Lots of colleges tell their applicants they don’t care about the SAT—but if that’s true, why do the scores of their admitted applicants fall into such a narrow range every year? And why do they require you to submit scores from the SAT in the first place?
Fact: Colleges sure seem to spend a lot of time gathering SAT data from their students for it not to matter to them—and it’s very coincidental that every college’s pool of admitted students falls into a narrow SAT scoring band. The data suggest that most schools care about the SAT, even if they occasionally say otherwise.
Misinformation From Your Friends And Family
Now we’re getting into a sore area. Most students are willing to accept that the information they get from the outside world might not be that reliable. But now I’m going to start talking about bad information you might be getting from the people closest to you, and that can hit home.
So let me repeat something one more time: I’m not suggesting that your friends and family are lying to you on purpose, or that they’re out to make you score low on the SAT. I’m just saying that they might be misinformed, and when they try to pass their advice on to you it might not actually be any good. As always, take the time to verify any advice by going to the source—real sample tests from the College Board.