SAT and ACT Score and their meanings

SAT and ACT Score and their meanings

A good question to ask is how good a score one has to get into a good college? One easy answer is percentile score: a percentile score gives one’s relative standing over all the students who have taken the same test. Since SAT and ACT are standardized tests, they are very valuable in finding one’s relative national academic standing.
To interpret the scores, find the appropriate score range and look at the percentile score. For example, if Tom gets 1910 in SAT or 28 in ACT, his percentile score is 88, which means that he scored better than 88 percent of the students who took the same exam. By the same token, we see that about 21,000 students get higher than 2,200 in SAT every year (This number is not precise because some students repeat the test).
Another interesting question to ask is how many students actually get a perfect score? We know that 2.1 million students took the SAT the previous year. Multiply 2.1 million by .0002, and we get 420 students. About 420 students get perfect score every year. I think it is safe to assume that a person who gets a perfect score would not repeat the test.

Percentile SAT (2400) ACT (36)
99.98 2400 36
99+ 2290–2390 34-35
99 2200–2280 33
98 2140-2190 32
97 2100-2130 31
88 1900-2090 28-30
83 1800-1890 26-27
78 1770-1790 25
72 1700-1760 24
61 1600-1690 23
48 1500-1590 21-22
36 1400-1490 19-20
15 1200-1290 16-18
4 1010-1190 13-15
1 790-1000 11-12