The best math departments put in the effort to cover their cinderblocks by decoding the Albanese gummi bear color to flavor puzzle.

Looks like students are more comfortable taking the current version of the SAT than when it was introduced in 2016. School-day SAT testing in Illinois and Colorado, among other states, has helped that out a lot.

An updated SAT vs ACT popularity map. The new ACT data system that replaced state-by-state reports makes this chart much more annoying to make. West Virginia went blue since 2018.

Here's a midterm exam for juniors at the high school where I work. From 1865. For question #9, I would need to be a historian to figure it out, I think. Also makes me wonder: would an 1860s U.S. high school student have a slide rule?

I wonder if the SAT has gotten better since April 2018, when this question appeared. A very common mistake here is to multiply 770 by (1 + 0.0236). The correct approach is to divide 770 by (1 - 0.0236). But both methods lead to the correct answer C. Not a well-designed problem.

An interesting table from a 100-year-old statistics book (1921). Almost 75% of the teenage children surveyed in Surrey, UK, had already had measles, and more than 50% had gotten pertussis (also known as the 100-day cough).

Too many confounding variables to explain the blue curve, but that's a lot fewer Calculus AB test takers than 4 years ago. The % of students receiving a score of 1 (red curve) went up from about 15% last year to about 25% this year.

The percentage of graduating high school students taking the SAT and/or ACT tests. 2021 wasn't the best year for the College Board and ACT, Inc. The SAT percentage hasn't been this low in at least 30 years. What will 2022 bring?

The percentage of seniors obtaining a composite score of 36 on the ACT test in 2021 is more than 17 times what it was 15 years ago. (Chart grabbed from the Wikipedia ACT article after I updated it with the last few years of data.)

The question of the value of the SAT aside, it costs about as much to take the test today as it did in 1958. On the other hand, it has been getting rapidly more expensive recently, especially if one's income hasn't been keeping up with inflation.

From the first paragraph in the new digital SAT specification document. (satsuite.collegeboard.org/media/pdf/asse…) I'm pretty sure the SAT isn't 100 years old until 2026.

The first copyrighted SATs date to 1932 and 1933. (Due to U.S. copyright law, they will remain under copyright until 2027!) The tests had 4 sections: antonyms, definitions, paragraph reading, and math, for a total of 300 questions in 150 minutes. You better be quick!

This time of year I'm writing a bunch of college recommendation letters for rising seniors. The only thing I typed in myself below was the line at the top. Not great, but how long will it be before it is? (beta.openai.com/playground)

A plot of my checking account interest rate versus current short-term rates so far this year. I don't really expect to get much from a checking account, but I want to think it would actually go up from 0.01% (which may as well be zero).

My once-a-year post? ACT scores since 1972; I just updated it through this year. It is always important to remember with plots like this that not starting with zero on the y-axis can make things more dramatic than they might actually be.