(Fluff post) why is the SAT out of 1600? What alternative scoring would make sense?
basically title.
The stated answer to "why is the SAT out of 1600" is that, originally, the mean section score is defined as 500, and 100 is defined as the standard deviation. Then, they capped it to measure +/- 3 standard deviations (200-800 section scores). Some things don't make sense to me though: now that the scoring is in intervals of 10, why not just drop to last 0? Also, the grading is not longer exactly tied to this definition; the mean and standard deviations drift.
Also, If they were to grade based on stddevs, why wouldn't they just give people's z score? Negative being below average and positive being above average would make sense and the score definition would be so much easier to explain
Any thoughts on this or ideas for hypothetical grading systems?