My S took the SAT for the first time today as well. He has been studying and taking practice tests. He also said eh thought it was easy. I hope he is correct with his assessment, and I have some concern with the curve on grading. I am told by those who know more than me, that October is generally a tough curve. I wonder how it will be this year. With so many juniors and and seniors taking it, it could be all different. i guess we will know in a few weeks…Good Luck to all the kids…
@Agentninetynine Both of my kids decided not to take APUSH because it is such a time suck. They both took a second AP science class as an elective instead and I think it was definitely for the best for us in terms of workload and they are STEM kids anyway.
My D17 took practice tests for the ACT and SAT this summer and got pretty equivalent scores but decided she prefers the ACT format. Otherwise she was going to have to take the SAT twice before the new one came out not knowing if that would be beneficial and as respected by colleges. She needs to take the SAT 2s in May since she’ll be finishing AP Chem and AP BC Calc around that time so I guess she’ll probably do the April ACT date and possibly June as well. Hopefully that will be it!
S will be taking his other SAT 2 test, physics, in May or June. I am hoping he won’t need to take the SAT test again. The tests are onerous. I am wondering how painful it will be waiting to find out what a qualifying score is for this years PSAT. They are changing the scoring along with the test and now it will be out of 1560 (or something like that). We knew with D15 that she qualified because we knew what the highest ever qualifying score had been in the state, and she exceeded it. This year we won’t have a clue! Blah.
The Physics SAT2 is complicated now that they changed the AP curriculum for physics last year. If you take AP Physics 1 there are 3 units that are not covered in class but are on the SAT2. These are covered in AP Physics 2 though. Here they won’t allow students to take AP Physics C until senior year (even though some juniors do take AP Calc BC) which is too late for the subject tests. You can miss a lot more questions on the SAT2 Physics test than other tests and still get an 800 though. Hence my daughter is taking AP Chem as an elective this year in addition to AP Physics 1 to be able to take the Chem subject test. She does really like Chem though thankfully.
@Collegecue @BigPapiofthree My son also said the SAT on Saturday wasn’t hard. He has taken the PSAT in 9th and 10th and the SAT in June. He always skips questions when he isn’t certain of the answer. When I look at his old score reports he rarely gets one of the questions wrong that he answers. It mostly that his score isn’t as good because he skips the ones he doesn’t know. So I was shocked when he said he didn’t skip ANY questions this time. So my thinking is either this really was an easier test or there were questions that seemed easy but there were things that he didn’t catch…
My daughter doesn’t want to take the SAT. She is taking the PSAT this month and then she is going to focus on the ACT. I think she wants to take the ACT in June and then if needed, she can retake in the Fall if she needs to up her scores.
@MSHopeful, if your D is a high stats kid and may score high enough on the PSAT to qualify as a NMSF or NMF, she will have to take the SAT and score above a 1960 (historically) as part of the qualifications. Caveat - With the SAT scoring change that begins with the March test, who know what to qualifying score will be when the new test is used.
@mtrosemom Thanks. I told her the same thing yesterday! She doesn’t think she’ll be a NMSF because of her math score, but I told her you never know. I think only one girl from her district got NMSF last year (there are 6 regular high schools in our district). But we’ll wait and see. If she does get NMSF then I told her she has to take the SAT. She has a 3.93 unweighted GPA so far (basically all As and one B) and got a 4 on her AP World History test but says she’s just “average.” LoL.
@MSHopeful - The thing is that because the PSAT is different this time there is no way of telling if the same type of kids will be NMSF. Your school may have more NMSF’s because they were taught what is now on the test. I think it will be interesting what the new cutoffs are and how they compare to the old ones.
@MichiganGeorgia That’s true. Didn’t think of it that way. We’re also in CA which has one of the highest cutoffs I believe.
I sit here a bit frustrated that I cannot convince my son to carve out the time to take the practice PSAT. This 10th grade score was within two or three points of NMSF for our state, so in theory, the same could be achievable this year, but the test format is different. Having said that, his only prep last year was taking the practice test distributed during PSAT registration, but I don’t know that he will have three free hours between now and next Wednesday. Regular homework and ECs take first priority. The life of a HS Jr is very full.
We had five NMSF this year and they were all girls! Go girls!
@MSHopeful – would your D consider taking the ACT in April or Feb? June can become quite busy with Finals and Subject Tests and end-of-year sports playoffs and banquets. I don’t like the May SAT for the same reason (APs and the prom added to regular life).
@CT1417 I’m not sure if she’s considered that. We’re going to NY in April to look at colleges. By the June test date, she’s already out of school, so hopefully it won’t be an issue. She will have finals right before though.
She hasn’t taken any PSAT prep (except for an online crash course but that wasn’t practice it was just tips and stuff). She’s the class president and busy right now with Homecoming. Plus she has Honors Physics and APUSH, so lots of homework. Not sure if she’ll get a chance to take a practice test. She took the PSAT last year and said she had 92nd percentile (not sure what the score was). I’m hoping she’ll at least do some practice tests for the math portion.
I thought about the best way to guess if a PSAT score may be qualifying by looking at the highest cutoff for our state and seeing what percentage it is based on the total score possible. For our state it is about 89-90%. For California for example, where the top score ever was it was 223 this year (222 last year), it’s about 93%. So to score the equivalent on the new test, a California kid would need to score about 1450 on the new test (supposedly 1560 total points). I’ll probably make myself crazy doing study like this 
@mtrosemom – but the rest of us here will be so grateful to you so that we do not need to drive ourselves crazy!
@MSHopeful – the April test is the 9th so if that is not during your spring break, might be something to consider. Allows time for retesting in June, in case score is not quite where she wants it to be. While the Sept test scores are released long before the ED filing deadline, it is still nice to know where things stand during the summer so as to be able to craft a realistic application list. Just our experience. Having said that, older son bumped his composite score more than 100 points in October of Sr year. We were not relying on it; it just made him a stronger candidate for the schools he was already considering.
I think, and too lazy to pull up old PSAT booklets, that the percentile score was for her 10th grade peer group, so that same score would probably yield a lower percentile in 11th grade. 97% needed for NM Commended.
@mtrosemom This link may help you take your mind off it. I pulled it off another thread.
@CT1417 Thanks for the information. Unfortunately we will probably be traveling that day or the next so looks like April is out. Yes, I believe that the PSAT was against her 10th grade peers. Hopefully with some studying and prep she can up that a bit. She also feels like she has learned more in her classes that will help her do better this year. So I guess we’ll wait and see. Do you know when the results of the October PSAT are released?
PSAT results had been released in December, with some schools distributing the scores in early December and others not until January. I think, but may be wrong, that the scores did not reach all schools at the same time. Unlike the SAT or Subject Tests, the scores are not posted electronically for the students to look up 19 days after the exam.
I have no idea what College Board will do this year or how long it will take them to release the scores. They announced quite a while ago that scores from the first sitting of the new SAT (March 2016) will not be released for seven weeks, versus the typical 19 days, so I wonder if they will experience a similar delay in releasing the new PSAT scores.
Others may have been following more closely and please correct me if I am wrong!
From CB website: “The College Board will email you an access code to view your online score report about two months after you take the test. Teachers and counselors will see scores about a day before you do and can give you the access code if you didn’t provide an email address when you took the test.”
@mtrosemom - The problem is that math use to only be 1/3 of the score but now it is 1/2 of the score so I’m not sure that the cutoff percentages for a state will be the same. I think it will depend on how a state does in teaching the math on the test…
In my sons case it’s not good that math is 1/2 the score. Last year he scored in the 99% in his state for both Reading and Writing but only in the 90% for Math. So I don’t think he is going to make our state cutoff.