Your percentile is based on the percent of test takers who had a lower raw SAT
score than you. If, for example, you’re in the 64th percentile, your raw score was
higher than the scores of 64 percent of the other people taking the test.
WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER SCORE—YOU KNOW, THE IMPORTANT ONE?
The other score you receive is the numerical score, which is on a scale of 200 to
800 for each section. This is the score that is shrouded in so much mystery.
Many people believe that SAT scores are set up on a bell curve, which means
that most people would get a score just above or below a 500 and that an equal
number of people would get scores an equal distance from the average. This
would mean that if 620 people got an 800 on the Math section, 620 people would
also get a 200. And it would mean that the average score on the test should be
- But none of these things is true. The College Board admits that the average
score on each section is not 500. For the class of 2015, the average math score
was 511, the average reading score was 495, and the average writing score was
The College Board uses a lot of averaging and shady crypto-math to
determine their curved scores. The National Center for Fair and Open Testing—a
watchdog group that believes that all of this information should be available to
the public—has suggested that the College Board takes a standard bell curve and
shifts it up slightly, allowing more 800 than 200 scores. They also go through a
complicated process of evaluating which questions on the test were the most
difficult and comparing your performance to that of other people who took the
same test and to other people who took the test in the last few years.