So, what you meant was “We could fill our freshman class with students who scored in the top 1 percent”.
If we think 1.7 million people took the exam, then 1% is 17,000. It’s believable that 2,000 of them applied to Stanford.
This site has a bunch of actuaries, and a multiple people who were in the top 1% but didn’t score 1600 (you may be one of them). So that difference kind of hits home.
The claim was 8000 (4 for every admit), all of whom had perfect gpas applied to Stanford.
Oops, forgot the 4x.
Not quite. What I said was the Stanford Alum magazine claimed that they had 4x the number of open positions with perfect scores and 4. GPA. That was a number of years ago, but not more than 10 years ago. I did not explicitly state it was an older publication. But as you have found yourself, getting accurate info on this sort of thing is not easy. Neither the testing boards nor the schools are very transparent.
It’s worth noting that the number of students taking the test at least once, dropped by 700,000 in 2021. Ms Gnome is the resident alum, and I’m afraid I don’t retain back issues. I do recall the discussion that ensued, where we were perplexed by why the number of entering freshman hadn’t changed in 40 years. And I do not recall whether that 4x estimate was SAT or SAT and ACT. Still, I had no reason to doubt the veracity of the article given the source. The public U I attended didn’t even use the SAT, only the ACT
Over the last 10 years, the legacy admissions at Stanford have declined - about 35% to 40% earlier, and the most recent two years, they were about 300 students, so about 15%. Apparently CA laws now require disclosure about legacy admits, where no such requirements were in place back in the day.
I also have no info on how many unique students took the test. Entire cottage industries now abound to improve your child’s scores. Multiple test sittings is quite common, especially for those applying to the elite universities. I grew up in the Midwest long ago, and multiple sittings just wasn’t a thing in our area.
The entire testing industry is kind of a joke, best I can tell. As well as the GPA craziness, where a B in an AP class is scored as a 4 and an A is scored as a 5 by many schools. Out of control, imo.
So I think it misses the point when we are talking about the effect on elite university admission criteria of the SCOTUS decision. Which was the topic. If you want to assume the article was BS, fine by me. But if you are doing analysis, it’s a lot more nuanced than simply multiplying numbers. And it is, at best, tangential to the topic.
For the record, I think it was silly for the court to even hear the case. The federal government deciding that they had jurisdiction at all was over reach by the court.
In your opinion the overreach was the judicial branch’s, not the legislature’s law governing private entities receiving federal funding?
This confuses me. Full disclosure: I haven’t had any coffee yet, so maybe I’m being dumb.
Stanford was fingered in the admissions scandal from a few years ago.
This is probably part of the story.
Back in when I took the test (it was slow, we had to scratch our answers onto the cave wall), my impression was that 1600s were so rare that they might amount to double digit numbers for the country as a whole.
I know I took it with no prep at all. I figured that it said “aptitude” and preparation was kind of cheating.
It turns out that the College Board doesn’t provide SAT statistics, but I can find online sources that claim they are getting those numbers from ACT.inc
College admissions: Perfect ACT scores soaring everywhere
ACT Perfect Scores Rising Dramatically - Hamilton Education
The frequency of 36s quadrupled in a six year period. Still, there weren’t 4,000 in 2018.
I have no trouble believing that Stanford and Harvard have 10 applicants who can Stanford/Harvard work for every person they admit. So I’m fine with the idea that these colleges should use non-academic criteria for building classes that are “diverse” in many dimensions.
Harvard’s mission statement is not “Prepare students to earn seven figure salaries on Wall Street” or “Give kids who had all sorts of advantages before they ever entered college even more advantage” it is
… to educate the citizens and citizen-leaders for our society. We do this through our commitment to the transformative power of a liberal arts and sciences education.
I think leaders of the future need to deal with people from many backgrounds. They should start practicing that on campus.
All that said, I still suspect hyperbole in that article.
“Although only 25 students had received perfect scores of 1600 in all of 1994, 137 students taking the (1995) April test scored 1600.” - Wikipedia
Note that I updated my post with some information on the ACT.
Thanks. Another note is the ability to “superscore” at many colleges. I read that this practice began in 2008.
As an explanation of the difference, April 1995 was the first time the renormalized test was given.
The SAT was the most pointless test I ever prepared for.
I thought the APs were a lot more relevant to actual college work.
I was in the 70th percentile for math and I ended up as an actuary 
Me too.
When recently interviewed about legacy admin results, the response was " among this years incoming class, 19% are the first members of their families to attend a 4 year university."
That kind of deflection always sets off alarm bells. Must not be all that proud of the legacy rate.
I was in the top 99% for math and I ended up as an actuary
I’m pretty sure I was in the top 99% in chemistry, with a psilocybin specialty. But my memory is a bit foggy on that.
AP exams were a great way to get annoying general education requirements out of the way.