An Excuse To Mention My 1480 Sat Score

By Joel Stein

I had always heard that your 20s are your most fertile creative time; few people have accomplished anything great after 30--not Einstein, not Newton, not Linda Lovelace. Now I know it's true. At the age of 29, I have tabled all ambitions to write a novel, play or episode of JAG. Even my planned autobiography, A Mildly Amusing Work of Limited Intellect, has been set aside.

To verify my deterioration, I signed up to take the SATs again so I could objectively compare my current self with my old, quite impressive, high school self, who got a score of 1480. Anyone can sign up online, as long as he can come up with creative answers like "34th grade." I vowed to beat my 1480 without any preparation whatsoever, unless you consider that the SATs are designed to measure your preparedness for college and I had four years under my belt. But I wouldn't do any extra studying to beat my original score, which I should mention was a 1480.

I showed up at Xavier High School 15 minutes early on Saturday morning, which meant lots of time to be stared at by 17-year-olds. I felt creepy, like some intellectual pedophile. Actually, I felt like a real pedophile, but I tried to make myself feel better with the intellectual part.

Eventually I was ushered into a small room, where I was not only older than all the other test takers but also older than the teacher monitoring the test. A large carving of Jesus hung above the blackboard, and a copy of TIME magazine, in which I'm pretty sure I mentioned masturbating, lay on a desk. I was sure I was going to hell.

As I had hoped, I breezed through the verbal section, in which the hardest vocabulary word was "megalomania," which I had no trouble whatsoever defining. And the math section, which I had feared, didn't have any tangents or cosines and gave you all the geometry formulas you needed. I never even had to go to my third No. 2 pencil. I felt far more confident than the first time around, when I actually got a 1480.

For the next three weeks, I bragged about how well I did, weakly hiding behind the second-person plural and pop sociology. "It turns out we are so much smarter than we were in high school," I'd say. "Not only our vocabulary but also our reasoning skills have developed exponentially." With everyone I talked to, I seemed to strike some hidden nerve, revealing that not only do most people harbor a secret desire to retake the SATs but they also dislike being around me.

Then I got my scores back. I did indeed land a perfect 800 in verbal, but I got a 650 in math, for a total of 1450. Worse yet, the College Board rigged the system in 1995, so my score would have been worth only 1430 in 1988. My brain had deteriorated nearly 5%, which is all you really use of your brain anyway. So really, more like 100%. You can see why I struggled on the math section.

At 17, certain I had blown my SATs, I kept quiet about my test performance until I got my scores back. So while my brave experiment did confirm that now I am indeed dumber, it also revealed that I am much cockier. And that, I have learned in my brief working career, is a far more important predictor of success than intelligence.