What are SAT Score Percentiles

SAT Score Percentiles – Your Ultimate Guide
Are you an SAT aspirant? Or have you taken the SAT recently? Well, we understand how tough it feels when you have to decide whether you should retake the SAT or what composite score you should aim for in order to get into the top colleges. We won’t leave you alone in this tough decision, so this quick and concise guide will provide you with all the information about SAT Score Percentiles that will help you maximize your SAT score and increase your chances of getting admission into one of the top colleges.

What Are SAT Score Percentiles?
You might be wondering now, what exactly is SAT Score Percentiles! Well, let’s first dig deeper into this and understand the basics of SAT Score Percentiles.
Your SAT Score Report will provide you with two things, your total composite SAT score that ranges from 400 to 1600, and your percentile ranking that will range from 1 to 99. Like your total SAT score, your percentile ranking will also be provided for your overall SAT exam and also for each of the two sections – Math and Evidence-Based Reading and Writing.

Percentile is an everyday use term and in the layman’s language, it means a number where a certain percentage of scores fall below that number or simply they help you compare your performance with other test-takers. It plays the same role in SAT, your SAT percentile helps you understand your performance in comparison with the other SAT-takers. Your SAT percentile rank will tell you the percentage of students who have scored lower than or equal to you. Your SAT Percentile rank, unlike the SAT Score, helps you determine where you stand and evaluate the chances of your getting into the top college. It clearly states to you, how well have you performed in context with direct comparison to other test-takers.

For instance, your composite percentile of 85 infers that your score is higher than 85 percent of students who appeared for the test.

The Two Types Of SAT Score Percentiles
Let’s move ahead to understand what the two types of percentiles displayed on your SAT score mean and in what context they differ. Your SAT score percentiles, either overall or for individual sections, have been divided into two types – the Nationally Representative Sample Percentile and the SAT User Percentile. These are divided with the aim of comparing student scores and their performances on the basis of two different reference populations.

The Nationally Representative Sample Percentiles are concluded from a detailed research study of the U.S. Students of grades 11 and 12. Regardless of whether these students typically took the test or not, these percentiles are leaden to represent all U.S. students in the 11 and 12 grades.

On the other hand, the SAT User Percentile represents and compares the performance of students based on actual scores in the past three current graduating classes and who typically took the current SAT.
Conclusively, since your User SAT Percentile doesn’t take into consideration the students who didn’t typically appear for the test, it becomes more useful in determining how competitive your scores are with respect to college admissions. Your Nationally Representative Sample Percentiles will be higher than User SAT Percentiles.

Do Not Get Confused!
With score percentiles, your performance will not be measured as points against fixed or objective scales, instead, everything about score percentiles is based on your individual performance against all your other competitors for the same exam.

Simply put, if you get the 70th percentile, it means that your score is better than 70 percent of your competitors and not that you have correctly answered 70% of questions.

Percentiles – A Complete Data To Help You
The data mentioned below provides you with the information about what composite score you need to bag to hit a certain percentile range. The inferences from the data will help you prepare a scheduled study plan and help you prioritize.

The College Board releases data about the composite score and simultaneous percentile ranges. Though this data changes slightly from year to year, we will provide you with the latest information to provide you an estimate.