How to Read Percentiles
No matter what how the current SAT or ACT is scored, its score scale is arbitrary. Understanding the difference between a 200-800 SAT score and a 1-36 ACT score can drive a person crazy. That’s why percentiles matter so much. Every SAT and ACT section score is based off a raw score which is then converted to a scaled score based on a larger testing cohort. Any score report will include both scaled scores and percentile ranks. And, really, the only way to understand the value of the former is to consider the latter. For any given score, your percentile or percentile rank describes what percentage of the testing population you scored higher than. For example, a score in the 70th percentile is higher than 70% of all the scores for that population. When it comes to test scores, the higher the percentile, the better you are doing! Students prepping…
Different Ways to Interpret a Score Improvement
For students and parents accustomed to their high schools’ grading scales, standardized test scores can feel inscrutable. Bad enough that every exam adopts its own arbitrary scale, but the test scores they produce show little relation to the number of questions a tester may answer correctly. Even more confusing, test scores and school grades are not at all aligned. Perfect grades definitely don’t translate to perfect or even excellent test scores, depending, of course, on the complex interactions between students, teachers, and assessments. Yet, if understanding what a given test score means is difficult, comprehending the magnitude of an increase from one score to another can be exponentially more challenging. How should someone who isn’t an educational professional recognize that a 2-point improvement is outstanding on an AP exam, good on the ACT, and too low to measure on the SAT? Obviously, the easiest way to appreciate the impact of…
Ultimate ACT/SAT Concordance Table
One of the many choices college-bound students must grapple with–apart from, say, which schools to apply to–is whether to focus on the SAT or ACT. The two tests overlap significantly in terms of content and structure, but their design philosophies reward different types of test takers. All colleges accept both tests equally, so students can lead with whichever one best showcases their particular strengths. However, the two dramatically different scoring schemes of the SAT and ACT have made determining how scores compare challenging to say the least. In the past, College Board and ACT have collaborated on concordance tables intended to establish the relationship between scores on these two assessments that measure similar but not identical constructs. After the big changes to the SAT in 2015, College Board released an SAT/ACT concordance table without any input from ACT, prompting the Iowa City test maker to blast the effort. At last,…
Easier 2016 SAT Percentiles
Considering how many decades the SAT has been around, you’d think we’d have a better handle on that signature 200-800 scale. Everyone grasps that 200 is as low as a scorer can go and that scores improve as they rise towards a perfect 800. But how much better is a 670 than a 620 or a 520? Arbitrary scaled test scores only make sense when we see their percentiles, the depiction of what percentage of the testing population we scored higher than. The College Board has finally released the first set of SAT percentiles for the version of the test introduced in March 2016. Beyond the discussion of SAT total scores, section scores, subscores, and cross-test scores, we find percentile ranks based on two different reference populations: The Nationally Representative Sample Percentile compares your score to the scores of typical 11th- and 12th-grade U.S. students. According to the College Board,…
SAT Percentiles for Spring 2016
American high school students take a staggering number of tests, each seemingly scored on a different arbitrary scale. Traditional school tests are usually scored on a 100-point scales, but APs are scored 1-5, ACTs 1-36, and SATs 200-800 per section. How can you possibly tell how well you’re scoring with so many different score ranges? If you want to understand score performance, you must look at percentiles. In simple terms, your percentile or percentile rank describes what percentage of the testing population you scored higher than. For example, a score in the 60th percentile is higher than 60% of all the scores for that population. With percentiles and test scores, the higher the better. Unfortunately for students taking the spring SAT, percentile data wasn’t expected because, well, comparing student performance on a test that has never been administered before is pretty difficult. We provided the means to approximate percentiles for…
Comparing New SAT, Old SAT, and ACT Scores
Colleges today do students a big favor by accepting SAT and ACT scores equally for admissions purposes. Students can choose the test that suits them best and only submit scores that cast their abilities in the best light. The big challenge becomes determining which scores are better, in terms of placing you higher in the continuum of test achievement. Complicating the mix even further, students who took the previous version of the SAT can still submit those scores to colleges as well. But should they? We cannot just assume that scores of 600 on the three sections of the old SAT equate to 600s on each section of the new one; these tests differ in profound ways. The College Board purports to make comparisons simple through the new SAT Score Converter mobile app and online tool. The main function of the SAT Score Converter is to compare old and new…