I came across an article on ESPN the other day about the California Institute of Technology’s men’s basketball team. It basically talked about how the team blows but the school is so academically challenging and the players are geniuses and blah blah blah. But in the article the writer mentions how the average verbal SAT score at Caltech is 2190 and the average math score is 2320. She further goes on to say that “a perfect score these days is 2400 in each.” Now I know the SATs have changed since I took it (which really isn’t that long ago) but I didn’t know the high score went from 1600 to 4800. And I thought they added a writing section??? Now, I’m an avid reader of espn.com and this won’t make me boycott them or anything like that because this is pretty stupid I guess and God knows I’ve made my fair share of stupid mistakes and writing about this will clearly come back to bite me in the ass soon enough, but how does this happen? Not only is the perfect score NOT 2400 in each but also, where are you getting your information from? Who is telling you that the average verbal score is 2190 and the average math score is 2320? Couldn’t you run this by those genius Caltech guys before the article was actually published? Or maybe a co-worker? I’m sure any 16 year old kid could’ve told you that those scores are impossible because in fact, the perfect score is 800 in each. Like I said, this is a stupid thing to get annoyed about and it was probably just an oversight by the writer, but I just found it ironic that an article about a bunch of geniuses would have such a gross academic oversight.
To read the article, click here.
