ACT SAT score concordance

Test Preparation
1

<p>College Board and Princeton Review both indicate that a 33 ACT is equivalent to about a 1470 SAT (old style).
See <a href="http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/satACT_concordance.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.collegeboard.com/prod_downloads/highered/ra/sat/satACT_concordance.pdf&lt;/a> and <a href="http://www.princetonreview.com/college/testprep/testprep.asp?TPRPAGE=8&TYPE=SAT%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.princetonreview.com/college/testprep/testprep.asp?TPRPAGE=8&TYPE=SAT&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>However, when I check the admission stats for particular colleges, a 33 composite ACT is paired with SATs which combine to much higher than 1470. For example, at Columbia, the 75th percentile ACT is 33, but the 760 and 780 SAT scores total 1540; at University of Chicago, the 75th percentile ACT composite is also 33, while the 780 SATs total 1560. See, <a href="http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cool/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/cool/&lt;/a> . </p>

<p>Are ACTs correlated with, say, higher GPAs or under-represented areas or groups? Can some of this be explained by the comparison of composite to the sum of the SATs? Any thoughts?</p>

2

<p>I think a disparity exists because a significantly smaller percentage of applicants submit their ACT scores, so the middle-50 percentiles will never truly be equivalent.</p>

3

<p>check and see if you can find what percentage of students submit each test for the colleges you're looking at. that should definitely have something to do with it.</p>

4

<p>At Columbia, out of 20000 applicants, about 2800 submit ACT and 18800 SAT; at UChi, out of 9000 applicants, about 3300 submit ACT and 7800 SAT. While more submit SAT, there are still many ACT submitters and many submit both. At Univ of Michigan out of 25000 applicants, about 20000 submit ACT and 15000 submit SAT. The discrepancy between ACT and SAT is lowest at UM, where 31 ACT is the 75th percentile while 1420 is the combined SAT 75th percentile. The concordance table says 31 ACT equals about 1380 SAT. Perhaps that small differential can be explained by the composite nature of the ACT the concordance table shows. Still strikes me as odd, though, for the others.</p>