My son recently took the 8th-grade PSAT and received 1010 on the test. Please help me understand what that means for him and future tests. Also, will this help him to be accepted into elite boarding schools?
It means very little in terms of future tests. The percentile is probably a more useful data point than the actual score. I would think his scores are top 10%, correct? That is probably good enough for a lot of schools.
1010 is 89th percentile, so top 11% of students who took the test and of College Board’s “Nationally Representative Sample”. In theory, this should give at least a ballpark figure for how he would perform on future CB tests - you can look up what 89th percentile scores are for PSAT, SAT. But given that it’s probably his first standardized test, probably 2-3 years until those other tests and only one data point, I wouldn’t count on it being that accurate.
I don’t have any feel for how “elite” some boarding schools are, but 89th percentile should be beneficial for many of them, I would think.
Most boarding schools will want the SSAT if he is thinking of applying as a repeat freshman or as a sophomore. But the good news is that he will probably do well on the SSAT. There are similarities between the two tests.