Teens who plan to submit SAT scores for college applications can use summer break to study, but it may not always be clear which SAT score should be their goal.
The SAT, an admissions exam many colleges and universities require of applicants, is administered by the College Board and scores students on a scale of 200 to 800 for various sections. The exam tests students on critical reading, math and writing, but the essay section is optional. The new SAT was released in March 2016.
With such a wide potential score range — the lowest combined score someone can receive is 400 and the highest is 1600 — admissions experts encourage prospective students to understand what colleges consider a good SAT score.
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The short answer is: It varies.
“It kind of depends on your background,” says Michele Hernandez Bayliss, co-founder and co-president of Top Tier Admissions, which helps prospective college students around the globe with test preparation. Admissions teams, she says, “factor a socioeconomic kind of calculation in their head.” The SAT score expectations might be higher, for example, for a privileged white high schooler than a teen from inner-city Harlem, says Bayliss, who previously worked on the admissions team at Dartmouth College.
The definition of a good score is also tied to a prospective college student’s goals.
“It depends on where the student wants to attend,” says Ann Dolin, the founder and president of Educational Connections Tutoring, which primarily serves students in the District of Columbia and parts of Maryland and Virginia.
At some schools, such as Brown University, incoming freshmen may average an SAT score that’s higher than 1400, while other institutions, such as Texas Christian University, may have an average SAT score that’s closer to 1200 for incoming freshmen.
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For Shahar Link, however, one score range is especially golden. “A 1500 or above pretty much opens the door to any school in the country,” says the founder of Mindspire Tutoring and Test Prep, which is based in North Carolina.
Ivy League schools and other top universities, such as Stanford University, University of Chicago and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, also prefer high scores, says Bayliss.
“Their averages — if I had to average all of them together — is roughly a 730 or 735 critical reading and right around a 730 – 735 math score,” she says.
A high test score alone won’t necessarily guarantee college admissions though. Most schools also weigh applicants’ letters of recommendations, transcripts and admissions essays, among other factors.
The average critical reading score was 494 and the average math score was 508 for prospective students from the class of 2016 who took the exam at least once through January 2016, the last time the old test was administered, according to the College Board.
Studying for a concerted amount of time can often help improve a score, experts say.
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“We see that kids set aside at least three months,” says Dolin.
Applicants can study independently using test preparation books or take a class, but individualized study plans can also help boost a score.
“If you can, get a tutor,” says Rachel Altman, an 18-year-old incoming freshman at Tulane University in New Orleans. Studying alone can get boring, she says, and a tutor can help you focus. Tutoring helped her to excel on the ACT, another college admissions test, but she took the SAT as well, she says.
Link, from Mindspire Tutoring and Test Prep, encourages applicants to have reasonable expectations while striving for a good score. It’s nearly impossible to go from a combined SAT score of 1000 to 1500, but a 150 or 200 point jump can happen with lots of hard work.
“To a kid who starts at, let’s say, 1000, and works their butt off for three months and gets up to a 1200, a 1200 is a great score,” says Link.
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