I shudder to imagine the day when SAT I percentiles look like SAT Math II percentiles and my 730 in writing (old SAT) marks me as semi-literate.
Don’t trust the user percentiles (and of course don’t even bother with the nationally representative percentiles as those don’t even include college bound testers . . . ).
If you really want to understand your current scores you will need to use the SAT converter to convert to an “Old” score equivalent. You can then look up the percentiles on the old SAT (lots of them available online).
So, for example, my daughter’s New SAT Math score is 760. User percentile is 98th. But when you convert to the old SAT you get 740 which is actually in the 96th percentile. I’d consider THAT percentile to be much more accurate, for the simple reason that it’s based on real historical tests (not some research sample).
Have people read the ACT’s letter about the concordance tables? They come out very strongly against adcoms using the tables, particularly the one that concords new SAT to ACT.
http://www.act.org/content/act/en/about-act/perspectivesandhappenings.html
@Ynotgo That is exactly what I’ve been saying. They aren’t comparable. What I think will happen is colleges will assess the strength of rSAT scores by looking at the overall scores submitted by their application pool and relating that to scores of past application pools, if that makes sense.
@itsgettingreal17 but how do you do that w/o some way of “relating” the scores between the two tests? Isn’t that what the score converter is all about?
@Mamelot Well scores are all relative, right? Even at schools that use holistic admissions, stats are important and every college wants a strong class (relative to their applicant pool). So suppose the new SAT scores of this year’s applicants to a particular school seems to be trending higher than last year in terms of absolute numbers, a school would realize that and grant admissions accordingly. They wouldn’t try to maintain the same mid-50 as last year given generally higher test scores. That’s all I’m saying.
Yes, but what about kids that only took the old SAT? How will those scores be compared to the new SAT scores, which are running higher? That is the entire point of a concordance table–so that scores can be converted and compared fairly.
We had a College fair in March and a representative from the State University System said the universities would wait for the concordance tables in May, then spend the summer deciding how the new SAT scores would be treated and make an announcement in Fall.
Obviously they are not taking the concordance tables at face value and are going to put a lot of effort into developing a policy for evaluating standardize test scores. That, or they are just going to wait see what we come up with on CC.
I’m just SO glad my kids are done with this nonsense. I agree with @lostaccount. Our kids are all owned by this testing, and frankly, it takes up valuable time and makes the whole college process much more difficult than it has to be. If colleges didn’t have to report test scores, then rankings couldn’t use test scores in measuring how good a college is, and colleges could figure out a way to choose great kids using all the other means they have now.
I just wonder how admissions would shake out if colleges didn’t have to worry about the SAT or ACT.
And what about the Early Action kids that are being offered admission in December? How would the colleges even have a good pool of other students to compare to? The concordance tables are needed in order for colleges to have frame of reference.
I think ACT is just ticked because CB has not worked with them on these ACT/CB concordance.
Colleges Don’t have to worry about the SAT/ACT if they don’t want to. There is a large list of schools that don’t consider test scores. The colleges Choose to use them (presumably so they can help compare student achievement across schools).
@Ruby789 wrote
You end up with the situation at UT Austin where kids admitted on the basis of class rank in non-rigorous schools, are flunking out of college.
CHECK OUT HIS HELPFUL CHEAT SHEET … Compass Education Group has done what I’d hoped the College Board–or individual colleges–would do. They’ve compiled a list of anticipated new-SAT-score ranges at popular colleges. Right now there are 100 schools on the Compass list, but that number will climb soon. The Compass folks hustled to pull this together promptly … bless 'em! Many of you who just got new SAT scores back and are wrestling with the concordance charts should find this very useful. Go to: http://www.■■■■■■■■■■■■■■■/college-profiles-new-sat/
@Sally_Rubenstone , Wow this is great! Thanks!
Thank you @Sally_Rubenstone. Very helpful!
How can 75th percentile be a perfect score? That makes no sense to me.
In all the cases I viewed, the 25-75 combined scores are simply the sum of the individual scores. I don’t think that’s accurate because that assumes 100% correlation between a person’s verbal score and math score.
@suzyQ7 said:
Would you trust your opponent to be a fair referee?
No, I wouldn’t. However, the concordance tables make the ACT look like a harder test, which makes ACT top scores look better. I think this makes the ACT look like a better test, and the SAT look easy
@itsgettingreal17 Having the 75th percentile be a perfect score would mean that the top 25% of students at least would have a perfect score. That seems crazy, but the overall percentile for a SAT 1600 must now be somewhere close to the percentile range for an ACT 35.
ACT 36 is reported to be 99.96 %ile. ACT 35 is reported to be 99.7 %ile.
Wow, the Compass Prep conversions say that 5 colleges have a 75th %ile combined score of 1600, 5 have a 75th %ile new SAT EBRW score of 800, and 17 have a 75th %ile new SAT Math score of 800