SAT and ACT Comparison | Perfect SAT Score & Perfect ACT Score

The New SAT and ACT Comparison Concordance Tables
(Digital SAT)

Compare your SAT to your ACT scores.

SAT score centering
The Student Score Portal
The student score portal will show your most recent digital SAT Suite of Assessments test. You can view a score summary, and click See Score Details for additional score insights, including:
• Information about your performance against college and career readiness benchmarks.
• Obtaining a perfect SAT score or obtaining a perfect ACT score is not by chance.
• Total and section score comparisons and percentile ranks among testing populations at your school, district, state, country, and/or all testers worldwide.
• Your knowledge and skills in four content domains in reading and writing and four content domains in math.
Watch the videos in the Resource section below to understand your scores, whether you took the SAT on a Weekend or in school on a school day.
Total Score
• Earning a perfect SAT score or earning a perfect ACT score is by design.

The top portion of your score information contains a big black number. This is your SAT score, also referred to as your total score. Next to your score are the numbers 400–1600, indicating that the range of possible scores on the SAT is 400–1600. To the right of your total score is your score percentile, telling you what percentage of students who took the test did better or worse than you. In small type below your score is your score range. This refers to the range of scores you might expect to get if you took the SAT multiple times on different days. Some colleges look at your score range rather than your total score in considering your application.
Section Scores
After the total score are your two section scores, Reading and Writing and Math. The two section scores added together equal your total score.
Your two section scores are presented on a line infographic that shows where your score falls in relation to a benchmark that means you’re on track in preparing for college. This part of your score insights also shows your percentile for both section scores, meaning the percentage of test takers who scored lower than you.
Your Score Recipients
After your section scores are your score recipients. Recipients are colleges or scholarship programs that you indicated you wanted your scores sent to. The score recipients section indicates the date your scores were sent and the status (whether they were sent or not and why).
Discover Growing Careers
Your score report may have you thinking about what comes next. If you live in the United States, your score report PDF will include Career Insights Snapshot—a list of growing careers in your state that need skills like yours. Please note that this list is NOT CAREER RECOMMENDATIONS or the only careers you should consider for yourself. The list can show you more about what careers are out there and key aspects of a job, like if it requires a college degree.
You may be curious about a career on the list—or maybe none of the options feel like a great fit. That’s okay! The insights can help you start thinking about what you might want to do after high school. If you checked your Career Insights Snapshot on BigFuture School, learn more about any career that sparks your interest. Simply navigate to “Career Explorer” to discover more possibilities. If you saw your Career Insights Snapshot on your PDF score report, take the short career quiz to find careers that reflect your interests.
Each job on your score report:
1. Is growing in your state, meaning there are jobs available.
2. Pays a living wage because we know salary is important.
3. Requires more education after high school, in some cases college but not in all.
4. Spans a variety of interest areas: Doers, Helpers, Creators, Organizers, Persuaders, Thinkers.
5. Connects to the math, reading, and writing skills you demonstrated on the test because every job has a set of measurable skills.
The College Board uses a process called equating to adjust for slight differences in difficulty among versions of the SAT, such as exams taken on different days. What is Equating? Equating makes sure that a score for a test taken on one date is equivalent to a score from another date. It is standard practice for assessments like the SAT®. The College Board uses this process because it’s important that the score a student receives on the SAT means the same regardless of when the student took the test. This ensures that there’s no advantage to taking the SAT during one administration versus another. A score of 540, for instance, on the Math section of one day’s test means the same thing as a 540 on a test taken on a different day—even though the questions are different. It’s important to note that this can mean that in some cases a single incorrect answer on one SAT could equal two or three incorrect answers on the SAT taken on a different day, or vice versa. Why Equating Is Important Equating is important for higher ed for a couple of reasons: 1. Students take standardized exams at different times. Admissions officers need to be confident that comparing the scores of students who took the SAT in August 2017 are equivalent to the scores of the students who took the exam in October 2018. 2. Equating allows admissions officers to compare scores of students who may have taken the exam more than once. This is especially important with the new SAT, which emphasizes the importance of practice and effort. An applicant who demonstrates improvement from one test administration to the next can be considered similarly to how you view a high school GPA that shows improvement from one school year to the next. Scaled vs. Raw Scores To equate scores across multiple tests, the raw score may not necessarily convert to the same scaled score. In other words,

the number of right and wrong questions may not convert to the same scaled score across all tests. The differences are not great, but they occur. For example, on one test administration, a student may have gotten only six math items wrong but received the same score they had on a prior exam when they got eight wrong. The level of difference in a student’s performance is very small; certainly too small to draw any appropriate inferences about a student’s ability to be admitted or to complete college work. Differences in raw vs. scaled scores are sometimes difficult for students to understand. However, it presents an opportunity to emphasize that these kinds of differences are minor compared to other background information that admissions officers use when evaluating students for admission. Equating is Not Grading on a Curve Some students and parents confuse “equating” with “grading on a curve,” but it’s not the same thing. When a test is scored on a curve, the score may change depending on how everyone else performed on the test. A student’s SAT score is based only on how they perform and is never affected by another student’s performance.
Some have asked if one should take the perfect ACT scores test over the other one. The perfect ACT score is the equivalent of other test scores. Some prefer the perfect ACT scores over the other.