what do you think is more important, appearance or intellect?
Are you aware of the fact that Bush didn't even score 1300 on his SATs?
In a President, I think that intellect comes third behind judgment and ability to see the big picture over minute details. Appearance doesn't really matter. The SAT tends to measure the ability to make distinctions about minute details, whether verbal shades of meaning (analogies) or mathematics (primarily algebra and some relatively straightforward geometry). The math side would seem to have little relevance to the responsibilities of a President, actually. The verbal side does test reasoning abilities to some degree, but through the lens of vocabulary. Neither section has all that much to do with a President's responsibilities.
I would agree that we want a President with a fairly good, above average intellect, but I would draw that line at around the 75th percentile, and say that anything from that point on up is probably enough. At that point, it's a matter of judgment. There I am sure we disagree on the merits of the current President.
And the other thing you need to consider is that the currency of SAT scores was inflated in the mid-1990's to adjust for the trend toward a less, well, "scholastically apt" population. Here is the College Board's explanation:
The most dramatic change in score calculation for the SAT in recent decades is described by the following quote from the College Board:
"In April 1995, the College Board recentered the score scales for all tests in the SAT Program to reflect the contemporary test-taking population. Recentering reestablished the averagescore for a study group of 1990 seniors at about 500 -- the midpoint of the 200-to-800 scale -- allowing students, schools, and colleges to more easily interpret their scores in relation to those of a similar group of college-bound seniors."
One effect of recentering is that scores are apparently "inflated" relative to scores before 1995. For example, what would have been a 1490 cumulative (V+M) score before 1995 is now called a 1600, the maximum possible score. Put another way, a score of 1600 today could correspond to a score as low as 1490 for scales prior to 1995. All scores, down to the lowest, are inflated relative to historical counterparts.
colinfahey.com
Cutting through the crap the College Board put in the beginning of the excerpt, it means essentially that a score of, say, 1250 in Bush's day may equate to a score higher than 1300 today, maybe higher than 1350.
Here are the translations of the scale pre-1995 with the current scale:
1290 old is 1350 current
1280 old is 1340 current
1270 old is 1330 current
1260 old is 1320 current
1250 old is 1310 current
1240 old is 1310 current
1230 old is 1300 current
collegeboard.com (contains complete conversion chart)
Anything above 1490 in the scale in existence before 1995 is now considered a "perfect" score of 1600. That is really a remarkable statistic in my opinion. When I took the SAT's in the 1970's, literally thousands of people around the country would get a score of 1500 or above. Today those scores would all be considered "perfect".
To return to the issue of Bush's SAT's, if he got 1230 or above on his SAT's, he did in fact achieve a 1300 on the current scale. On the current scale, if one gets 650 on both halves of the test, that would equate to a percentile ranking of 89 for the verbal and 86 for the math. Therefore, if Bush got a 1230 on his SAT, evenly divided between math and verbal, he would have achieved the equivalent of a 1300 today (650/650), and would have achieved a higher score than 86 percent of the test takers on math and 89 percent on verbal (see Table 6 of collegeboard.com. There have been other recenterings before 1995, so in fact Bush's score may have to be adjusted still further upwards to be read in relation to the current scales. To do that one would need to know the year he took the test and the scores he got, which you didn't mention in your post. |
