<p>I read in an article a while ago that statistically the curve is better in a certain month than the others....is this true and what month is it?</p>
<p>It is the december/january months. The reasoning is that most gifted programs (CTY, Duke TIP) have students take the test at that time, so the college board curves well there.</p>
<p>^Not true. </p>
<p>The curve is individually determined for each test administration. It does not depend on how the test takers perform on that actual administration. It depends solely on the difficulty of that particular section of that particular test. The difficulty of the sections which compose the SAT are chosen at random for each test date. So no, there is no way to predict difficulty of a test before actually taking it/seeing the curve.</p>
<p>Further one must remember that the SAT is a standardized test. This means that a say 740 on one test is equivalent to a 740 on another date. The 740 would have been statistically just as rare and just as difficult to achieve on both test dates. This is exactly why a curve exists for the SAT; it accounts for changing difficulty of the test from one administration to the other. Note: This doesn’t mean you won’t score better on one test than the other. Clearly people do score better on one than the other. But statistically, all administrations of the SAT are equally as “difficult” and it is just as hard to get a given score on one administration than it is on any other administration.</p>