A few things to remember about IQ testing and scores.

1-  By definition, the Median score of a population is always 100.  So if the population as a whole is getting smarter over time,  people tested later are smarter than people tested earlier.  The opposite also is true, if a population is getting stupider over time, people tested earlier on the time line are smarter than those tested later, at the same score.

Now ask yourself, is the population of Amerikans getting smarter or stupider?

2-  The SAT test given to millions of Amerikan college bound students each year is a thinly disguised IQ test.  It scores from 800 to 1600.  Knock off the last digit to get the IQ.  If you scored 1250 on the SAT, that's a 125 IQ.  The reason it stops at 160 is because it's not normalized past that, and no common IQ test is.  Claims of IQs like 180 or 200 are pretty much ridiculous and are specialized tests that require you have quite a bit of learned knowledge to even try taking them.

3-  Every year since the 1960s the SAT has gone through revisions, 3 major ones I am aware of.  Why?  Because the raw scores were decreasing for the population, so in order to normalize the curve for a 100 median derived score, the test had to be simplified.  AKA, the population of college bound seniors has been getting stupider.  A major reason for that is over the same time period the population of college bound students vastly increased as more colleges popped up and needed students.  A huge class of people never tested before were being tested.

3- Thee SAT score you get is most closely correlated to the income level of the father.  AKA, rich people get higher IQ scores on average than poor people.  Does this mean (as Elon Musk would have you believe) that rich people are smarter than poor people?  Of course not.  IQ tests have a huge cultural bias, and what they test is what a rich person is exposed to and expected to learn as they grow up, both in school and in their other experiences.  So as more people from lower middle and poor classes took the test, down went the median score.

Fast forward to today, they are dropping the SAT completely from college admissions requirements, with my best guess being that the median raw score is so horrifically low from nearly every kid educated in the public schools it's close to useless anyhow.  Although the National Average IQ of 100 must still be true of the millenials and later, I guarantee this is a stupider 100 than that of 30 or 50 years ago.

4-  Typical, traditonal IQ tests developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are tightly bound to western european, christian, white post enlightenment scientific type of thinking that serves you well if you go to an institution like Cambridge or Harvard.  If you grew up in a household like that, you probably did well.  Traditional Jewish households also do well, and so do Chinese and Indians.  Aboriginal and Native people, Blacks and Hispanics do not score well as groups.  There are of course individuals who do well.

5-  Despite the limitations of IQ testing, I personally cannot fathom exactly how colleges are going to be able to discriminate at all between students based only on grades from schools with wide disparities in what they teach and how well they teach it.  Is it going to come down to your essay?  AI will probably write most of them.  Interviewes?  They can't possibly innterview everyone, even with Zoom meetings.

Not that this is that important.  College has become a fabulous waste of time and money for everyone, even the elite.  What you learn there now has nothing to do with what you need to know.

RE