<p>I got 99% in verbal
and 89% in reading,
but my math was a 68% which brought my whole score down! </p>
<p>I’m also the same age as you and I’m super stressing out about boarding school also. </p>
<p>I plan on retaking the SSAT in October but really trying harder to raise my math score.
Buy LOTS of the SSAT practice book and study LIKE CRAZY. No joke. If you study really hard, (I studied my vocab words everyday, and I took my flashcards EVERYWHERE. To school, to the car to look over them,) You can really do better! Don’t feel down! My first SSAT math score was a 46% and I brought it up by 22 points!</p>
<p>Can someone explain to me how my younger daughter’s SSAT verbal score could have been 671 (31 right answers, 12 wrong and 17 omitted) in January and then FALL to a 638 (with 36 right, 9 wrong, and 15 omitted) when she took it again in May?</p>
<p>I understand about the variation in SSAT percentile from test to test, but when you actually get more answers right, less wrong and omit fewer, how does the actual score go down?</p>
<p>My older son took this test many times usually scoring in the 85th percentile - but last January’s test was absurdly hard according to him and he fell to 79th percentile after much practice. He took the test a month later and his overall percentile was 91st. I personally find it absurd that a student’s score could change that much in a month - and feel for families who don’t have the means to retake a test if it’s not truly reflective of a student’s ability.</p>
<p>It worked out well for my son this year - so I think practicing is important, but it’s not the whole picture of an applicant by any means.</p>
<p>It’s true that your daughter’s raw score was higher for the second test than for the first one (34 vs. 28). When they convert the raw score to a scaled score (i.e., the 671 or 638), what they’re doing is adjusting for variation in difficulty of the test administered on those two different dates. In other words, the SSAT board felt that the second test was easier than the first one, so the higher raw score didn’t help, and in fact was less good than her performance on the first test.
As for the dramatic swing in percentile for your son, well, all the percentile ranking is intended to do is say how he did on that test as compared to all the other kids who took the exact same test. The test is reflective of his ability to answer the questions posed on that test. I don’t think any school looks at the SSAT as being entirely reflective of an applicant’s intellectual capabilities, which is why they also look at grades and teacher recommendations.</p>
<p>Thanks - I hadn’t realize the actual scores were scaled as well. But I do think any student who takes these tests should realize that one bad score does not always indicate how you can do on another test since the level of difficulty can vary from test to test and from section to section. I do appreciate that many schools now take best scores from two sets of tests - that does seem more fair to me.</p>
<p>But just so you know, many schools don’t. Or I should say, it’s not like they only see the best scores of each test. When I was applying to colleges a million years ago, SAT just reported your best verbal and your best math score, that’s it. That’s not how this works. You can have multiple test dates reported to a school, but they’ll see all those scores then, not just the specific score of math or verbal, etc. So if your child has one test where they do very poorly on one section and very well on another, you might be better off going with a different test where there wasn’t a really low one in the bunch.<br>
The schools my son applied to said that if you submitted multiple test dates, they’d consider all the scores in the mix. The educational consultant we talked to said you’re probably best off going with the test date that has the highest overall percentile ranking.</p>
<p>If you are sick, or miss a page, or calculator explodes you can cancel the test, and nobody sees the scores (not even you). </p>
<p>We waited until after we had seen the scores before sending them to schools, and did not use the “freebies” you can request at test time. It is a little more expensive that way, but reassuring.</p>
<p>Sign up for an early test (Oct) so you will have time to schedule a re-test in November/December if needed, get the results and decide which one to send to schools for January deadlines. Only the application year’s scores count, the previous year’s scores are wiped. </p>
<p>Around here, test centers fill very quickly so find out when testing opens and reserve your preferred date and center ASAP.</p>
<p>We also waited to see S SSAT scores before sending them, and it was still free. Not sure why prior poster said it was more expensive. If you take the SSAT more than once in an academic year that is noted on your report, but schools will only see scores that you send. Each school has its own way of looking at multiple scores for a student.</p>
<p>I think 2prepMom probably forgot because SAT’s are different; you get a certain amount of free scores if you sent them right away but otherwise have to pay. But right–with SSAT’s we didn’t send the scores until after they came in.</p>