There is no such thing as a “hard” or “easy” SAT, because the SAT is a tool that ranks students against each other, rather than against an absolute metric or benchmark. What there can be is an SAT that draws fine distinctions among top candidates and an SAT that does not. The SAT used to draw these distinctions. It used to have a standard deviation of 200 points, which means the entire range between 1400 and 1600 was dedicated to distinguishing among testers scoring above the 98th percentile. Now, a 1400 is around the 92nd percentile and high scores convey much less information because there are a lot more of them. This change was made at the behest of the schools, who are the SAT’s actual clients. What they want the SAT to do is set a floor below which they can auto-reject all applicants. Then they want to choose among the students above that floor based on subjective criteria. They do not want a test that tells them who the best students are, because they want that determination to be subject to their discretion. A “hard” SAT — a test that demonstrates to a greater degree than the existing SAT that the student excels at the particular skills assessed by standardized testing is a product without a market, because schools do not want to know this about students. Admissions officials do not want this data collected at all, because it disqualifies some of the students they prefer to admit.