Interesting: I took the SAT in 1982 and don’t remember this problem. They don’t give you your % right, just percentile and a mysterious score between 200 and 800 for some reason. Does 800 mean 100%?
When I took the SAT a couple decades later, there were multiple sittings per year. Is it possible you took it at a different time? You should be able to check the news coverage and see which sitting it refers to.
Back in 1982 our school’s entire SAT prep was: “bring only #2 pencils. Sharpen them before you come. Fill the bubble completely and don’t leave any other marks. If you can eliminate one answer, it’s worth picking one randomly, else skip the question.” I don’t remember that there was any SAT prep culture like there is these days. Nobody had heard of ACT — perhaps it didn’t exist yet.
There were apparently about 50 of us in my year at MIT who had 800/800, and apparently that was pretty standard. I don’t think I was the only one in my HS class of 39.
The scaled scores are intended to be directly comparable, so the mapping from raw score to scaled score depends on the difficulty of the questions on the particular test that you took. On a sufficiently hard section, you can miss a question and still get an 800.
