Did anybody else fail to appreciate the sheer number of students who have “top” stats in assessing your student’s likely chances of admission at very selective schools, like I did with my student? When I was applying to colleges in the 80’s, it seemed as though SAT scores over 1500 were very rare and that such scores provided a golden ticket to any college a student wanted to attend. Nowadays, it seems like students with “top” stats are rejected more often than accepted. Given the below statistics, I will be more mindful with my next student that the scores I considered to be very rare in my experience as a student are almost commonplace for today’s students. Coupled with many of the “top” stats students often applying to ten or more colleges, these scores are just not the rare golden ticket they used to be.
The number of students receiving scores in the “top” range of the SAT today is three to four times the number that received such scores when our children were born (or thereabouts). The College Board reports the following numbers of students receiving between 700 and 800 for the respective sections of the SAT and between 1400 and 1600 overall in the listed years. (Note that 2017 numbers appear to include only the New SAT rather than both New and Old SAT, which were both taken in 2017, so absolute numbers of “top” scores for 2017 are likely under-reported.)
http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/CBS-96-National.pdf;
https://reports.collegeboard.org/archive/sat-suite-program-results/2017/detailed-2017-reports; https://reports.collegeboard.org/pdf/2018-total-group-sat-suite-assessments-annual-report.pdf
Year - Verbal/ERW - Math - Total
Score - (700-800) - (700-800) - (1400-1600)
1996 - 47,360 - 58,374 - NR
2017 - 95,445 (6%) - 120,043(7%) - 84,806(5%)
2018 - 140,614 (7%) - 202,088(9%) - 145,023(7%)
The number of perfect scores on the SAT has increased dramatically since we parents took the test. In 1985-86 nine students received perfect scores on the SAT; in 2017 about 300 did. I read somewhere that over 500 did in 2018, but I now cannot find that source. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1986-12-07-mn-1245-story.html; (The citation for the 1985-86 numbers seems solid; it is also notable that a perfect SAT by a student in Dallas was considered so newsworthy when we parents were students that a Los Angeles newspaper printed a story on it. 2017 numbers are difficult to find, as I think the College Board is not forthcoming with that information; I had to rely on a report from a commercial test prep source (link not allowed).
The percentage of first year students at Princeton in the “top” range of the SATs has increased since our children were very young. (Princeton was used as an example Ivy because it was the first one I found that maintained Common Data Sets for many years back.) Princeton reports on its Common Data Sets the percentage of first year admitted students that received between 700 and 800 for the respective sections of the SAT in the listed year as follows (see Section C9 of Common Data Sets):
Year - Verbal/ERW - Math
2002-2003 - 69% - 73%
2017-2018 - 81% - 84%
A test-prep commentator, Art Sawyer, has recently noted similar trends in test scores in his article “Great to Good: The Diluted Value of High Test Scores.” “With the release of class of 2018 results from both ACT and College Board, we can now say definitely that students saw the most competitive scores ever. In the last 10 years, the number of students scoring 1400-1600 on the SAT or 31-36 on the ACT doubled. In just the last 5 years, the number of students scoring 1500-1600 or 34-36 has doubled.” Link omitted in case not permitted by Terms of Service (but Google is your friend).
