Fault in SAT 75th percentile publishings

According to PrepScholar, a 1600 on the new sat put you in the 99.9826 percentile. This means 0.0174% got perfect scores.

Out of the 1.7 million people who take the test, this means that 295.8 received a 1600, (I rounded to 300 for simplicity).

But on http://www.stateuniversity.com/rank/sat_75pctl_rank.html, it states that the 75th percentile of 3 schools, Harvard, Princeton, and Caltech, is a 1600.

If each class is 1200 students, then 300 at each school had to have received a 1600. But this does not add up. At just Harvard, Princeton, and Caltech, there should be over 900 students with a perfect SAT score.

This doesn’t include the other students at other schools who receive a 1600 on the SAT.

Is there some fault in my logic/calculations? How can schools report this type of data to us?

@kjake2000 maybe the schools also include ACT scores converted to SAT ?

No I highly doubt they would do that. My only conclusion is that the reported data is for accepted students and not matriculated students. Then, there would be many cross admits between these schools. I still think this is unlikely though. @Penn95

I believe Harvard and Princeton both superscore the SAT across test dates, just not between new and old. It is also likely that many of this year’s admits took the old SAT.

You’re not using primary sources. Prepscholar’s numbers are wrong. In 2014, 583 people got 2400 on the SAT, according to Collegeboard. Maybe with some digging, you can find the numbers from college board for 2016 or 2017. Similarly, I wouldn’t trust the other website. Look for the common data sets for each university.

Superscoring.

I wonder if all the schools are now reporting superscores? If not, then these reports are not comparable.

I’ve been assuming schools that super-score report 25-75 range with super-scores, and schools that do not report range without super-scores. But I don’t know the answer. Does anyone know for sure?

The common data sets don’t even report total scores. They report 75th percentile for math, 75th percentile for verbal. There’s no guarantee that adding the 2 together will give you the 75th percentile for the total. It might be easier to look at the ACT scores where they do give the total. Princeton’s 75th percentile was 35 last year.