Sometimes colleges argue they can’t just look at SAT because they have more applicants with perfect SATs than they have spaces, but that doesn’t explain why you would almost all your successful applicants (from this school) would have sub-perfect SATs.
If the SATs are normed to a lower level, you might expect that doing perfectly on them might not be super predictive of outlier ability, compared to just doing extremely well.
Analogously, imagine a test for Alzheimer’s with 100 questions. Even if most people without Alzheimer’s only get <90/100 questions right on them, we might not expect there’s that much extra predictive validity between 99 and 100 right. (see also).
If the SATs are normed to a lower level, you might expect that doing perfectly on them might not be super predictive of outlier ability, compared to just doing extremely well.
Analogously, imagine a test for Alzheimer’s with 100 questions. Even if most people without Alzheimer’s only get <90/100 questions right on them, we might not expect there’s that much extra predictive validity between 99 and 100 right. (see also).