1: Using tables 3, 4, and 5 (Most colleges care about individual section scores rather than the total)
780 + 720 + 710 = 2210
2: using tables 3 and 6:
780 + 1450 = 2230
3: Using Table 1 (But remember 600(RW)+ 800(M) is not the same as 800(RW) +600(M) )
1540 → 2260
So, 2210=2230=2260 according to college board’s new math
Or colleges may choose to completely ignore the tables and simply treat new and old to be the same.
E.g. 39.5 20 + 3820 + 37 * 20 = 790 + 760 + 740 = 2290
In any case, all this math will be history in a about a month
I don’t know if it matters at all, but I’m personally biased to the old SAT scores and don’t think the conversions are very accurate at all. The first time I took the new SAT I scored around 200 points lower according to the conversion despite getting very similar results in terms of incorrect answers. The second time I took the new SAT I was still 50 points lower in conversion despite getting LESS questions wrong. By comparison my ACT and old SAT scores convert very well. Personally I ended up sending everything to colleges.
I think people are making this unnecessarily complicated. The concordances simply show how the percentiles on the old SAT align with the same percentiles on the new SAT. The tests themselves are different from each other, so there’s no reason to expect a student would get the same percentile ranks (and therefore the corresponding scale scores) on both tests. In other words, the tables cannot be used to “predict” how you will do on the new SAT based on your old SAT score. They just tell the colleges that whereas a 95th percentile on the old test was X, on the new test the 95th percentile is Y.
Also, while Williams and UVA may have provided mid-50s stats for both tests, they didn’t say how many had taken each test. But the CB states (inside their converter app) that they expect more new SAT takers for class of 2021, so if any converting is to be done, it will be from old to new.
Meanwhile, from the horse’s mouth:
“We’re using the Equipercentile Concordance method, which relates scores on each test that have the same percentile rank. In other words, scores on two different tests are considered concorded when they have the same percentile rank. For example, the score at the 75th percentile on the old SAT score distribution would correspond to the score at the 75th percentile of the redesigned SAT score distribution.”
The Equipercentile method would be great if it had been done with the actual test-takers. My understanding is that it was done from a research study…whose results seem to diverge significantly from those actually taking the test.
Bottom line: until we get further into the use of the new version, we can’t know much. For now, how your scores work will be a matter of the applicant pools at your targets.
I don’t see why you would need special test takers if all you are doing is aligning percentiles. CB isn’t saying that the ppl at 95th percentile on the old test are the same as on the new one. Now, it could be that CB still can’t reliably say what the percentiles are on the new test, but that’s a separate issue, and was a good reason to take the time-tested old SAT or the ACT.
They say they’re aligning percentages, but If they were serious, they’d describe exactly what populations they’re aligning.
As @thshadow pointed out in another thread, if the concordance aligned percentiles among large numbers of people who took tests under real conditions, then there wouldn’t be much of a problem. But “they’re big on ‘research populations’ and other imaginary groups. For the PSAT, the percentiles were grossly inflated… So it’s hard to trust much of anything from CB, TBH!” I would agree. The PSAT concordance was such a disaster that I can’t bring myself to trust CB now (especially not in the very upper range of scores.)
I second what @LadyMeowMeow said. The percentile available from CB is just a hypothetical one and it was way off the mark as exposed in PSAT (NMSQT Selective Index (SI) of 200 had a percentile of 97 but the commended cut off was 210). It is so sad that CB couldn’t get the percentile right after spending a lot of dollars on the ‘research population’.
@LindsayHarvard, You bring up a good point about students who submitted both the old and new SAT. In such cases admissions might superscore old and new separately and use whichever is best (guess it would be old for most students).
I think most colleges wouldn’t care too much about the anomaly. They will go with their gut feeling and simply look at the scores as reported without doing any conversions. But it is hard to know what the impact would be for the students since college admissions in general is a black box. Among the students there will be some winners and some losers but no one would know who won and who lost
@evergreen5 This is getting close to a smoking gun, isn’t it? Absent other information about the pools at Williams & Vanderbilt, one could guess that although the overall mean scores may have shifted right from the old SAT (grade “inflation”) at some point, maybe around 700 in both sections, the new test is harder (grade “deflation.”)
@LadyMeowMeow I agree. To all the people out there at CC who thought that the Concordance Tables were rubbish (including myself!) it looks like we were right!
I wouldn’t assume the pools are the same. To begin with, anybody planning to do serious prep work would have skipped the new SAT and taken the old SAT and/or the ACT. Also, those submitting the old SAT had to be satisfied with scores from fall or January of their junior year. Since students get stronger over time, and many guidance counselors only recommend taking standardized tests starting in spring of junior year, it is likely that those taking it earlier are stronger than average. Basically a self-selecting group. So if ACTs stay the same, it’s not surprising if old SAT scores are strong and new SATs are weak. For the HS class of 2018 and later, it should be easier to compare new score averages to the old scores.
"To begin with, anybody planning to do serious prep work would have skipped the new SAT and taken the old SAT and/or the ACT. "
Really?? That is a pretty broad and arbitrary assumption. Just one example - for a number of reasons (including but not limited to trying fit in SAT Subject Tests and SATs around the ridiculously rigorous British National Curriculum) my DD decided to take the New SAT and was still able to do “serious prep work” and rock her exams. She also thought that the New SAT would favor the truly intelligent students as there were fewer opportunities to game the system. There are a number of other students here who have posted similar stories.
@keiekei I agree that we won’t really be able to compare new/ old until CB releases the percentiles. I’d only note that your argument goes both ways: if students get stronger over time, then the savvy juniors who took the new SAT in spring 2017, with the idea of taking it again in fall 2017 if needed, have every chance of forming a stronger pool than the ones who contented themselves with old SAT scores from earlier in their careers.
While I’m skeptical of all guesstimates about the relative strength of the general pools for the different SATs, the Vanderbilt info is more precise than that: it represents a (test-minded?) university’s private, mini-concordance. In the same pool of accepted candidates, those who submitted an old SAT needed a 790 to reach the 75% for Critical Reading; those who submitted the new SAT needed a 760. On the old SAT, they needed a 750 Math to get to the 25% mark. On the new one, only a 730. It’s not absolute proof, but it’s highly suggestive.
My interest in this is that my daughter is waiting to hear from many colleges shortly. She scored 750M 700V on the new SAT and got deferred early decision from Colby. I’m hoping her scores look better by the time they compare them to the full pool of applicants. I assumed she got deferred because we need some financial aid, now I’m wondering if they used the concordance table and this didn’t help her. The rest of her transcript is pretty impressive as far as ec’s and course rigor. etc., not trying to brag, just to give some context. She has done it all on her own.
For us, my daughter is the oldest of two, so our first go around with the college search and we were thrown this curveball. She has a very balanced list and is not over reaching on many, but she has only heard from the 4 safer options, so pretty nerve wracking right now. ( This post is part of my venting mechanism ; ) Some observed that this is the only year it is a problem, but if it’s your first child’s year, it’s the only way it’s ever been.
She told us after the test that she was in a zone, and thought she did pretty well. Good for us, she attends an average public high school and didn’t take any SAT prep besides one at school for a few hours. She thought she had a chance of getting all the math questions right, so she didn’t guess on any of the math answers. This makes me think guessing had a lot less impact on the top end scores, and in some cases no impact at all. I have no clue if the top question were equally difficult or not.
@keikei You said: “I wouldn’t assume the pools are the same.”
I agree. But how they differ is anybody’s guess. Were those who took the old SAT more savvy and smart? Or did they benefit from a larger body of test prep material, both legal and illegal?
In the end, what matters is what the admissions committees think…and I think they are treating the pools as if they were the same, and ignoring the concordance tables.
“the Vanderbilt info is more precise than that: it represents a (test-minded?) university’s private, mini-concordance.”
I wouldn’t say it’s a mini-concordance, because the pools are separate, and somewhat self-selecting as mentioned before. Let’s wait another year and compare the HS class of 2018 cohort to 2016.
