Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by nindalf 828 days ago
How is this possible? Do you mean that the top 6% all get perfect scores and all get assigned 94th percentile, rather than 100th?

Anyway, this isn’t true in my experience. 167/170 in math got me 94th percentile. Far from a perfect score.
2 comments
pfannkuchen 828 days ago
Yes the top 6% all got perfect scores. This happened to me on one of the optional SAT math exams, I was ironically confused for a bit.
link
Tempest1981 828 days ago
Test needs to be harder
link
pfannkuchen 827 days ago
Maybe, maybe not. For this sort of test there is a huge selection bias since only people planning to work in math or an adjacent field bother to take the test. If you gave the same test to the general population this wouldn’t happen. I’m guessing most selective schools treat it as sort of a pass/fail, and I’m not sure whether that’s problematic for them or not.
link
zerocrates 828 days ago
It's definitely my recollection from the GRE (though this was many years ago now that I took it): for math a perfect score got you a percentile in the mid-to-high-90s, while on the opposite side you could lose several points and still be 99th percentile in verbal.
link