Do colleges exagerate the SAT scores

<p>Whenever I check their websites, their SAT seem so ballooned, yet when I go on Collegeboard or the Princeton Review the average score is about 50 points less. I feel like I should trust Collegeboard most out of any of them because they actually track the scores when they are sent.</p>

<p>well you also have to see if the data you get from collegeboard is accurate bc sometimes it's off by a year.</p>

<p>colleges that post their common data sets follow the accepted methodology for publishing scores. Colleges that do not make their common data sets public likely do exagerate their data, IMO.</p>

<p>One thing that's misleading is this: colleges list the 25th- 75th percentile of ADMITTED students; collegeboard does it for MATRICULATED ones. Of course, the second will be lower and more indicative of the student body. It makes sense. Say Yale kids use Wesleyan as a safety-type school; Wesleyan's SAT scores for kids they admit will be very high, but for the kids that actually go there, it'll be lower.</p>

<p>If you go to the college web site and search for "common data set" you will get the information for enrolled students (not admitted ones). You usually have to scroll down a bit, there is a lot of information in those files.</p>

<p>Wesleyan is right there on their site (page 10) - <a href="http://www.wesleyan.edu/ir/cds/cds2007-08.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.wesleyan.edu/ir/cds/cds2007-08.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>as is yale (p. 9) - <a href="http://www.yale.edu/oir/cds.pdf%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.yale.edu/oir/cds.pdf&lt;/a> (about 50 points higher)</p>