<p>Can one truly trust a school's published SAT statistics? That is, do schools play games with the statistics to make their school seem more selective? I have seen many variations, e.g. admitted students versus entering students. Other schools format the results according to their format.</p>
<p>Is there any central dtabase of SAT information that is reliable and trustworthy?</p>
<p>Collegeboard if it’s up to date</p>
<p>CollegeBoard just bases its data off of the self-reported data that the colleges put out, so unless they conflict I wouldn’t necessarily say that CollegeBoard is more reliable.</p>
<p>I think that while SAT scores are subject to skewing (i.e. enrolled admits vs. admits in general, and other such tricks), they’re not wholly inaccurate. For example, if you’re at the 25th percentile of a college’s reported SAT range, I wouldn’t really assume that you’re ACTUALLY at the 50th percentile.</p>
<p>Oftentimes, the figures do lie, but for a different reason. For example, a look at any of the ivies’ SAT ranges (especially the non-HYP ones) might give a little bit of a shock to those used to viewing the schools as nearly impossible to get into. The truth is that these schools are much harder to get into than the SAT score ranges might suggest.</p>
<p>As usual, the advice is to take SATs as only one part of the application, not the focus of it.</p>
<p>Most of the games have been discovered by journalists and have ceased. Any Common Data Set information collection is getting its information from the same source: reports made by the colleges. Some of the reports have penalties for false reporting to federal agencies, or to lenders, connecting with the reports, so they tend to be reasonably comparable. </p>
<p>[College</a> Search - Find colleges and universities by major, location, type, more.](<a href=“College Search - BigFuture | College Board”>College Search - BigFuture | College Board) </p>
<p>[Common</a> Data Set Initiative](<a href=“http://www.commondataset.org/]Common”>http://www.commondataset.org/)</p>