Before you begin preparing for the SAT, it’s important to have a sense of what your score goals are. Knowing approximately what score you’re aiming for is important for many aspects of your prep, from planning for how many times you should take the test all the way to deciding how to allocate your time during the preparation process. During the process of setting score goals, many students inevitably end up asking the same thing: what is a “good” SAT score? In this post, we’ll try to answer that question.
How is the SAT scored?
First, a quick detour to remind you how scores on the SAT are calculated. Scoring on the SAT is reasonably complex, but understanding how it works can help you decide where to focus your time and effort while you prepare for the SAT. Here’s what you need to know.
Raw Scores
First, you’ll receive a raw score for each of the four sections on the SAT; each raw score is simply equal to the number of questions you answered correctly in that section. This is the part of the post where I remind you that no penalty is applied for incorrect answers on the SAT, so you should always always always answer every question, even if it’s a total guess. If you don’t at least guess, you’re functionally leaving a quarter of a point on the board for every multiple-choice problem you don’t answer.
It’s important to note that your raw scores for the two Math sections will be added together to produce a single overall Math raw score. So although there are two separate Math sections on the SAT, you’ll only see one Math score on your final score report.
Equating
After your raw scores are tabulated, the College Board will use a process called ‘equating’ to convert them into scaled scores, which range from 200 to 800 for Math and from 100 to 400 for each of the other two sections. These scaled scores take into account the difficulty level of the sections that you completed relative to the difficulty levels of sections that previous test-takers have completed over the last several years; this allows colleges to be sure that your Math score of 720 means the same thing as your older brother’s 720 from a few years ago.
Composite Score
Finally, your three scaled scores will be added together to produce an overall composite score that ranges from 400 to 1600. This score is the best single measure of your performance on the test, and it’s the score that colleges will primarily look at when reviewing your application.
Superscoring
The SAT itself does not superscore, or combine individual section scores from multiple test dates to obtain your maximum composite score. If you wish to send scores from multiple test dates to colleges, you must send the entire score report from each test date. You can, however, pick and choose which test dates you send using the College Board’s Score Choice feature.
Additionally, many schools will perform their own version of superscoring by combining the highest score for each section from the score reports that you submit in order to get a picture of your “best” performance on the SAT. Let’s say you take the test in December and get a 720 in Verbal and a 580 in Math (1300 composite), then test again in March and earn a 690 in Math but drop to a 650 in Verbal (1340 composite); you then decide to submit both sets of scores with your applications. Schools that superscore will take the 720 in Verbal from your December report and combine it with the 690 in Math from your March report, which means that they’ll consider you as having earned a 1410 composite score for the purposes of their admissions processes.
The benefits of this are clear: that 1410 is significantly higher than either of the composite scores you earned on the two individual test dates, which puts you in a better position to be competitive with other candidates. Knowing which of your prospective schools superscore and which don’t is an important part of figuring out what a good SAT score is for you, so make sure you’re doing your research. Remember that for the most accurate information about how an individual school handles superscoring, you should contact that school’s admissions department directly.
What is a good SAT score?
Now that you have a firm grasp on how to interpret SAT scores, let’s return to the central question of this post: what’s a good SAT score?
As you might expect, the answer to this question varies from student to student. If your heart is set on MIT, for instance, you should be aiming to get approximately a 1580 on the SAT to be in the 75th percentile of first-year undergraduate applicants. On the other hand, if your dream school is in the University of California system and is therefore test-blind, a good SAT score for you is no SAT score at all! So the easiest way to answer this question in something approaching a universal fashion is to simply say that a good SAT score is one that makes you a competitive applicant to the school(s) you’d be interested in attending.
A good way to start figuring that out is to generate a list of schools you’re interested in and then research score statistics for each. Test scores are one piece of information that applicants can use to sort their prospective future academic homes into the three categories beloved by college counselors everywhere—reach schools, target schools, and safety schools. Most schools provide data regarding the test scores of at least their most recent admitted class on the admissions portions of their website, so that’s a great place to start.
If you’re not at the point yet where you’ve started assembling that list of schools and simply want to get a general picture of where your scores stand relative to those of other students, check out the College Board’s most recent data on nationwide score percentiles. Or, if you don’t feel like analyzing a table, here are some selected benchmark composite scores and their associated percentiles (relative to SAT score data from August 2021 to June 2022) to give you a rough sense of how the numbers shake out overall.
- 1600: 99th percentile (duh)
- 1500: 98th percentile
- 1400: 93rd percentile
- 1300: 86th percentile
- 1200: 75th percentile
- 1100: 60th percentile
- 1000: 43rd percentile
What are the average Ivy League SAT scores?
Whenever I’m discussing score goals with my students, it’s not uncommon for the conversation to turn to curiosity about admissions requirement for some of the best schools in the country. Everybody knows that one kid who got a 1560 on the SAT or a 35 on the ACT without even doing any prep—what doors did that open for them? What are the average SAT scores that it takes to get into an Ivy League school like Harvard or Columbia?
But First, A Piece of Unsolicited Advice
Look, the Ivy League is comprised of fantastic schools. There’s a reason names like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are used as benchmarks of academic excellence. And if you absolutely have your heart set on one of those illustrious institutions, feel free to skip this portion of the post.
If you’re here because you’re doing initial research, though, or even just because you’re curious, I would be remiss if I didn’t take the opportunity to say this: there are so many phenomenal schools outside of the Ivy League. No, really—higher education does in fact exist outside of the Northeastern United States. I promise.
Joking-but-not-really-joking aside, the best advice I can give to anyone in the early stages of the college search process is to start as broad as possible. Think about more than the name on the front of the building. Consider location, size, cost, and the specific strength of the school’s academic programs in any particular areas you already know that you’re passionate about. This country has an incredible number of places where you can get a fantastic education (as do other countries!), and the vast, vast majority of them aren’t Ivy League schools. Don’t be so focused on applying to the “best” schools that you miss out on the best school for you.
Average Ivy League SAT Scores
Below is a list I’ve compiled of SAT composite score ranges for Ivy League schools. The first number is the sum of the 25th percentile scores for Verbal and Math (so the scores that would place you at or above the level of a quarter of the admitted students that year), while the second is the sum of the 75th percentile scores. All numbers come from the IPEDS database, provided by the National Center for Education Statistics, and represent the stats for the application class of Fall 2021.
- Brown University: 1460-1570
- Columbia University: 1470-1570
- Cornell University: 1450-1560
- Dartmouth College: 1440-1560
- Harvard University: 1480-1580
- University of Pennsylvania: 1480-1570
- Princeton University: 1460-1570
- Yale University: 1480-1580
Unsurprisingly, the trend is pretty consistent, and the takeaway is clear: if you want Ivy League SAT scores that are competitive with the Yale median or the Harvard median, you’re aiming for roughly a 1530. Median scores for some of the other Ivies are slightly lower, but you should still expect to be pursuing a score in the 1500s.
It’s also interesting to note that the SAT Math scores that represented the 25th and 75th percentiles were higher than the corresponding SAT Verbal scores for all eight Ivy League schools. Princeton, for instance, had a Math range of 740-800 but a Verbal range of “only” 720-770.
It’s likely that this has more to do with the relative strengths of students who choose to submit SAT scores versus those who choose to submit ACT scores than with any kind of preference on the part of the schools (particularly because the percentiles of ACT scores for admitted students showed the exact opposite trend); however, it does mean that your application may stand out slightly more if you apply with an extremely high SAT Verbal score. Whether that really makes any kind of a difference during the evaluation process is a question that I’ll leave to the admissions experts.
How do I get better at the SAT?
Whether your dream school is an Ivy or one of the thousands of other outstanding institutions in the US and abroad, you may be looking for some help to get better at the SAT. Why not head over to GoTutor’s SAT headquarters? Our squad of test gurus would love for you to use the courses they designed to get better at the SAT and achieve that sky-high score you’re aiming for.