Just a hypothetical question, but which would look better to colleges:
A 36 composite on the ACT or a 1550 (out of 1600) on the SAT. I noticed that the common data sets for most college use a huge range for ACT scores (30-36), whereas the range for SAT scores reported is much smaller (1400-1600 CR+M). I am wondering if this impacts admission chances when applying for college, as they seem to care less about ACT scores. Am I mistaken about these assumptions?
A 36 ACT sounds better from my perspective, because a higher score cannot be attained, while with the SAT, a higher score could be attained. I think ACT and SAT scores are weighted equally, but it ultimately depends on your targeted schools.
If you look at the distribution you will find them to be almost identical. 30-36 is 95th percentile - 99th. About the same with 1400-1600 SAT.
They definitely don’t care less about the ACT. What can happen is that depending upon where a college is located and where students apply from only small percentage of students might submit ACT scores and a greater percentage submit SAT scores. The opposite might be true in the midwest where the ACT is more prevalent. As of about 2 years ago more students took the ACT than the SAT nationwide. If you are fortunate enough to have both a 1550 and a 36 submit both. 30 might be 95th percentile but a 36 is 99.93 percentile. Might not seem like a big difference but 99th percentile is 1 student in 100, 99.93 percentile is 1 student in 1,400 or so.
Im pretty sure the sat and act ranges are the same. 1400=30, 1500=33, 1600=36.
For middle 50% ranges, you will often find that the ACT range is seemingly a little lower than the SAT range. That is caused by many colleges superscoring SAT’s but not ACTs. Colleges do not care less for ACT scores than SAT scores. What happens very often though is that high school students applying to colleges read far more meaning into slight score differences than any college ever does.