@ProfessorPlum168 those are great scores. Your son sounds extremely bright. Thanks for sharing that.
Just curious, did he send all of those scores to those schools? Did he apply ED to any of them?
And also, @ProfessorPlum168 you said reading was harder on SAT. Would you say his scores on ACT were better in Reading/English compared to his SAT?
Not sure that reading is harder on SAT. It really does depend on the student. My S19 blew away the EBRW on the March SAT with a 790, as we figured he would given his scores on the practice tests. He never took the ACT but did prep for it with several practice exams, lots of study etc. English would come out ok - 33 or 34, but Reading no higher than a 32. He concluded that it was too time pressured for him to do a good enough job for the schools he was targeting so shifted the focus to SAT to try his luck there. For him it was a much easier exam. The original sources etc. never bothered him as he has been in a Classical/Catholic literature-heavy education and is a well-read kid. He’s also a bit thoughtful and thorough and less “strategic” in his testing style. The SAT was just more straightforward, as far as he was concerned. Perhaps this is what throws a lot of kids, who are expecting more time-pressure and strategy.
@collegemomjam he said that the Reading part on the SAT was definitely harder than on the ACT. Most of his improvement though from test to test came on the Writing and Language side of things IIRC. He had 800s on the Math section each time, but 700, then 720, then 740 on the Reading/writing portion. Also, his essay scores were 19, 20, and 22 on his 3 attempts (he’s a blah writer). His last ACT breakdown was 35s on all, except for Reading which was a 36. He had a 9 and then an 8 for his ACT writing essay scores.
He didn’t ED anywhere because his #1 school was UC-Berkeley, which doesn’t have ED. Stanford was his other #1 but his HS counselor told him that his grades probably wasn’t going to be good enough for ED acceptance by Stanford, so he should wait for regular decision so that they could at least see his 6 AP classes’ grades from his senior year. Hah that didn’t turn out well… but he did get into UCB so all’s well that ends well.
Also, at my kid’s HS, 7 kids got a perfect ACT score. From what my kid can tell, no one got a perfect SAT. FWIW, there were 52 National Merit Semi-Finalists from my kid’s class. I think the cutoff was 1490 PSAT for California?
@ProfessorPlum168 Congrats to your son! Go Bears!!! Oh how I miss Wheeler Hall.
Plenty of perfect ACT scores at my son’s school too, but no reported perfect scores on the new SAT to date. His class size is about 135 and they have about 20 NMSF’s a year.
NMSF determined by selection index rather than composite score so a 1490 might work - or might not, depending on how you did on EBRW vs. math. S19 got a 218 so below what MN will come in at (he’s commended for sure but very likely not NMSF). Funny thing is, S19’s composite PSAT was 1430 and his (hopefully one and done) SAT was 100 points higher! he did a lot of studying between those dates, figuring out where he could go wrong, etc. He worked almost 100% on Math since his PSAT EBRW was also near perfect. Just in comparison, his ACT practice math scores weren’t higher than a 28, but he got a 740 on SAT math. We are accounting for maturity (he prepped for ACT while a sophomore but took the SAT as a Junior) but also the prep. CB means it when they say that prep will help you.
My S18 got a 34 and 35.25 on his ACT attempts w/o prep course. He took an SAT prep course and got 1520 and 1540. 35 NMSF in his HS class of 276 and there are 6 ACT scores of 36 but no 1600 SATs. Seems similar to other’s experience.
SAT is on a 1600 scale and ACT is 36 scale. 1 mistake could get you a 1590 vs 1600. Not the case for ACT because of smaller range of scores.
My daughter took the SAT twice. Each time she took it she got one wrong on math, which equated to a 770 and a 780. I know someone who got 4 wrong on the CR section and got an 800. Doesn’t really make sense to me…might be because of some kind of curve? And if the SAT is indeed harder (the English), does the curve make up for that?
@collegemomjam each SAT sitting has a predetermined curve. College Board decides ahead of time how difficult a given test is and decides how it will be scored. Sometimes, one wrong on math is 800 but sometimes it’s 790. Honestly, I’ve never seen one wrong be less than that. If you look at all eight published practice tests, you can see how to score them yourself. Each of those are a little bit different.
@suzyQ7 I think that’s the point some of us are making. One wrong on the whole SAT test and a score of 1590 should probably equate to a 36 since that 36 could have been rounded up from 35.5 and been an ACT test with more than one wrong.
Really, at this tippy top it doesn’t matter all that much. Those kids have obviously passed the threshold to be admitted to any school. At that point, decisions are being made based on other things.
@homerdog no it was definitely one wrong each time, but it was the old SAT maybe that’s why you haven’t seen that? We really scrutinized her results with her tutor. I think it had to do with the ones she missed…like one was an easy one, one was a hard one, or something like that. She left none blank.
I do think because the colleges see the ACT score breakdowns by section, that kind of takes care of the difference between a 1590 or a 36. If a 36 is actually 35/35/36/36, they will see that. I guess the biggest chance of being treated unfairly is when a college only uses the composite score for ACT or the combined score for SAT. But do we think they really do that? My gut is a 1590 will look better than a 36 anyway, but I have nothing to base that on other than my personal experience of seeing more high ACT scores vs. SAT scores.
Do you guys seriously think that an AO will spend time analyzing a 35/35/36/36, a 1590 or any other combination in that range? I personally do not believe that. It does not make sense and I have not seen a single example that would lead towards this conclusion. A 1590 will absolutely not look better than 36. The AO will check his rubric with “high scorer” and then move on. The 5-8 minutes that he has to read the whole app he ll spend them in more productive ways. And a scorer of this caliber better have some interesting things put down in his/her app otherwise he/she will be disappointed with the results.
I agree that the AO won’t spend that much time on the score but I don’t believe they only use the composite/combined number, especially at the top schools that evaluate holistically. You see students with higher scores getting denied and lower scorers getting in all of the time. They look at the subsections. It takes an extra 5 seconds.
Someone applying to Engineering at a top school that has an 800 math might look better than the kid with the 35 on the ACT Math or science section. And they certainly won’t look worse if they have a 790 English.
At the end of the day, these are hairsplitting differences. Yes they will both be designated “high scorers”. But I don’t think a 1590 would be looked at more negatively than a 36, especially when the four sub-scores are probably right there in front of the AO and impossible to miss (assuming there are two 35’s in there).
“Do you guys seriously think that an AO will spend time analyzing a 35/35/36/36, a 1590 or any other combination in that range”
Totally agree. If you think this, you have not read enough CC posts. The test is a threshold, folks. A 35 is the same as a 36. A 1550+ is the same as a 35/36! Move on and spend time on showing your personality in the application.
“@homerdog no it was definitely one wrong each time, but it was the old SAT maybe that’s why you haven’t seen that? We really scrutinized her results with her tutor. I think it had to do with the ones she missed…like one was an easy one, one was a hard one, or something like that. She left none blank.”
The new test has completely different scaling from the old, and doesn’t deduct for wrong answers.
My son’s EBRW was -2 (39), 0 (40). That’s the 790. Definitely helped him to have aced the writing since that tends to be the most brutal curve. He thought the reading section was more difficult than what he encountered with the practice tests and Kahn; however, he missed about the same number on the real test as he did in practice. Math was -7 (37). He was consistently missing 7 - 8 in practice and scoring under 700 as a result. So this real test had a much more generous curve. Some said the math was “hard” but he thought it was about what he was used to.
His sister took the SAT in March 2016 and these were her scores: -5 (37), -3 (37), -5 (38). Seems that the March 2018 test had about the same curve for math, maybe slightly tweaked for reading. Hard to tell as the numbers are so clumpy now - the old test allowed for a smoother transition from raw to scaled.
“I guess the biggest chance of being treated unfairly is when a college only uses the composite score for ACT or the combined score for SAT. But do we think they really do that?”
It might depend on the school. Some are going to pay very close attention to math subscores etc. Some will view a low score on one section favorably if the other section makes up for it and the overall composite is within range.
As posted above, a 1590 or a 35 ACT is fine for admission pretty much anywhere and if the application is rejected then other factors were in play. At that level, they aren’t going to pick it apart unless they need to look at subscores for a particular reason.
@suzyQ7 I agree…but someone had said they didn’t think it was fair that you needed a 1600 to be on par with a 36. I agree, when you are in the 99%, it’s all the same and other factors are what will put you in the yes or no pile.
The point was that only a 1600 is a 36 on the College Board’s concordance table. Perhaps the 1590 should also be a 36 on that table and that would push some of the other concordances down as well. So maybe a 1540 is concorded to 35 instead of 34…