SAT
- Sometimes confused with SATs or sats, which are National Curriculum assessments in the UK.
The SAT (formerly the Scholastic Aptitude Test and Scholastic Assessment Test) is a United States national standardized test invented solely to denigrate high school students by giving them scores based on how well they picked a random answer in a multiple choice exam. It used to consist of two multiple guess sections — English and Mathematics. With the addition of a Writing section in 2005, students can now feel smarter than their parents when comparing scores — since each section is scored from 200 to 800, the "old" maximum score was 1600, while now it is 2400.
Once the student is accepted into a college (or decides to embark upon a career of menial labor or criminal activity), the SAT score becomes meaningless, except as a way to measure oneself against others who took similar versions. Thus, studying for the SAT fills a student with meaningless information that is discarded immediately afterward. It is rumored the best antidote to over-studying is a good booze party.
Over time, many colleges and universities have discovered that SAT results are a poor indicator of future academic success, and so are placing less emphasis on them, even to the point of not requiring the test results in application packets. Some completely ignore them.
One way of seeing this is how the SAT has changed names over time. In 1990, it was realized that the SAT was in no way an "Aptitude" test measuring intelligence, and so it was changed to the "Scholastic Assessment Test." Three years later, the College Board (which runs it) decided it couldn't even claim that much, and so the letters no longer mean anything.
A similar competing test, that is also largely irrelevant to success in life and academia, is the ACT. (The ACT originally stood for "American College Testing," which was innocuous enough, but also now is simply the letters.) It contains four sections (English, Reading, Mathematics, and Science), and colleges give heavy weight to this test, despite the criticisms.
[edit] How smart are you?
Embarrassingly, Mensa accepts SAT scores from way back when, when the test was harder to guess at, as proof of potential members being sufficiently desperate to justify their awesome IQ of 130 or so.