<p>It's never really been questioned, but why is it out of 800 for each section? Where is the reasoning behind one question can take off 20-30 points after 700, but only 10 points below 700? I know it's all with the curve, but do you guys have any other system in mind? It's 54 questions, and I know the curve and difficulty of the test are important, but a 750/800 (say 2 questions wrong) looks worse than 52/54 questions right.</p>
<p>its alot because of the "curve"</p>
<p>go ask the college board, only they would know....</p>
<p>Missing 2 questions is two times worse than missing 1 question and is much worse than being perfect. On the other hand, who cares about the difference between -15 and -16?</p>
<p>They did that because at the upper tiers, missing one or two more questions is a huge difference in ability. At the lower levels, it isn't rare for a person to miss 4-5 more questions than they would on average.</p>
<p>It is only on unusually easy SAT math tests that -2 = 750. More typically, -2 is 760-770. As a percentage, 52/54 = 96%, not very different from 760/800 (95%) or 770/800 (96%). Of course, this isn't really a good comparison since the scaled scores don't begin at 0.</p>
<p>You can see what a comparable linear curve would look like using:</p>
<p>scaled score= 200 + 6 x (% correct).</p>
<p>This gives (first number is linear, next is an average sat curve):</p>
<p>54/54 800 800
53/54 790 790
52/54 780 760-770
51/54 765 740-750
50/54 755 720-730
...
27/54 500 510-520</p>
<p>The 800 is completely arbitrary, however I'm guessing that at some point a decision was made not to have the lowest score be a zero.</p>