The David Hoggization of Harvard

How the College Board inflating SAT scores by ~150 points over the last 30 years gave Harvard more leeway to admit not-so-sharp leftist celebrities and scions.

In response to this morning’s post on SAT/ACT scores, a reader writes:

It is under-appreciated how the SAT recentering of 1995 helped birth the elite undergraduate world of today, with its emphasis on resume-padding activism.

Before scoring on the SAT-Verbal test was made easier in mid-1995, the SAT-Verbal subtest was, in the judgement of anthropologist-geneticist Henry Harpending, the best high-end IQ test in the world.

The SAT had originally been set up so that the verbal and math tests each had a mean of 500 and a standard deviation of 100.

But they’d been normed on the student bodies of Atlantic Seaboard prep schools. Whatever else you might want to say about Choate and Groton, they had high standards for verbal precision.

So, as more and more public school students took the SAT, the mean score for the Quantitative subtest stayed pretty stable. But Verbal scores crashed down into the 420s as more of the unwashed masses with their dubious grammar signed up to take the SAT. From Wikipedia:

SAT Verbal scores were so low before 1995, with the number of perfect 800s being given out annually barely into double figures, that the score was pretty valid out to somewhere between and three four standard deviations above the mean.

In contrast, even before the score inflation of 1995, scoring an 800 on the SAT Math section was a little too common for fine discrimination. I can recall a conversation at Rice U. in the late 1970s, when one STEM major was praising a classmate’s brilliance:

“He’s a pure 800 on Math!”

Somebody replied, “But you got 800 on Math, didn’t you?”

The first responded, “Yeah, but I got a low 800, he got a real 800.” And all the Rice STEM majors nodded their head with comprehension at this distinction.

I arrived at Harvard in 19XX [pre-1995]. The one 1600 in our class was a minor celebrity (and heck, even my 800 verbal as a 15yo was worthy of note). The guy was actually a quite miserable and misanthropic person, interested only in his academic specialty (and he is a professor now, as far as I know). And yet, Harvard had to admit him. With only so many 1600s to go around, if other schools had them and Harvard didn't, that would dent Harvard's precious prestige.

After the 1995 recentering

when about 70 or 80 points were added to SAT Verbal scores and about 20 points to SAT Math scores

, we entered a world where there were more 1600s than slots at Harvard.

The loss of resolution at the top of the scale handed immense power to the admissions committee. Untrammeled by the need to accept visibly superb minds in order to preserve prestige, Harvard could filter instead for "character" or "having had Daddy pay for a trip to Honduras to build wells" or "having founded a non-profit at 16!"

And then in 2017, verbal scores were boosted another 39 or so points and math scores about 18, so current overall SAT scores on a 400 to 1600 scale are now about 150 points inflated over pre-1995.

Paywall here. I consider an example of this effect identified by my correspondent after the paywall.

So, if Harvard now wants to admit the not-particularly-bright but enterprising celebrity gun control activist David Hogg, with his 1270 SAT score, instead of some boring no-name kid who would have scored 1600 in 1994, well, by taking Hogg now, it’s sacrificing 150 points less off Hogg’s contribution to Harvard’s average SAT score than it would have 1994, when Hogg would have scored around 1120.

So, in 1994, if the choice came down to admitting Hogg with his 1120 or Brilliant Noname, with his 1600, letting in Hogg would have sacrificed 480 SAT points off Harvard’s total numerator in calculating its mean. But these days, Harvard only sacrifices 330. And in return it gets a leftist celebrity!

Note that Hogg, who graduated from high school in 2018, took the SAT right around the time in 2017 when scores were boosted another 50 or 60 points, so I could be overstating the Hogg Effect by assuming Hogg benefited from both the 1995 and 2017 score inflations, when he might have missed out on the latter.

But clearly, these kind of admissions are becoming easier for Harvard to afford due to the two score inflations of the last 3 decades.

The general point is that Harvard’s admissions committee now has more room to craft the kind of freshman class that Harvard’s admissions committee wants without paying as much of a price in lower average test scores by ignoring applicants with no hooks other than they are really, really smart.

Also, if I recall correctly, it seems like over the years, US News and World Report switched from reporting colleges’ mean SAT score to reporting their scores as the 25th and 75th percentiles, which sounds smart, but it really means they can pack the bottom quarter of their class with David Hoggs, and they don’t have to pay much attention to the top quarter. So letting in Hogg, who was clearly in the bottom quarter, had no impact on Harvard’s reported scores.

Yet, Harvard, as so often, is getting the last laugh. This year, young Mr. Hogg was elected vice-chair of the Democratic National Committee: