By Catherine Tierney
New SAT scores are out! Along with the new scores, the College Board also released a number of concordance tables to help equate scores on the new test to the old SAT and the ACT. The key takeaway? A high score on the new SAT may not be worth as much as it used to be.
The same student who earned a score of 1100 on the new SAT would have only earned a 1020 on the Math and Critical Reading sections of old SAT. Likewise, a 1300 on the new SAT corresponds to a 1230 on the Math and Critical Reading sections of the old SAT. Thinking about the ACT, a 1500 on the new SAT corresponds with a 33 on the ACT. This same ACT 33 used to equate to a 1460. (Keep in mind, the ACT hasn’t changed at all).
The test prep world has been abuzz with chatter since the College Board released the scores and tables, some of it quite contentious. First, it’s important to take a look at how these concordances were determined. To generate the tables, The College Board compared percentiles across tests. So, if the 90th percentile on the SAT is 1400, and the 90th percentile on the ACT is 30, these scores are concordant (at least in the eyes of the College Board).
What’s behind the change in scores? Many are speculating that the new SAT is simply easier than the old. In reality, it’s mostly just different. The old SAT had a guessing penalty. For every question answered incorrectly, a quarter of a point was deducted from the raw score. The new SAT, like the ACT, has no guessing penalty.
Without a guessing penalty, there is now no way to “lose” points on the test; if you answer a question incorrectly you simply don’t get the points, but nothing is deducted from your score. Thus, the new SAT has a considerably higher score floor than the old SAT, but the maximum score on each section still sits at 800. The elimination of the guessing penalty, along with a reduction in the number of answer choices from 5 to 4, certainly contributed to this lift in scores.
The SAT could have adjusted for this “natural lift” when norming scores but chose not to. The more suspicious among us speculate that this is because they want to attract more test takers. The ACT surpassed the SAT as the most “popular” college admissions test in 2012 and has not let up since. If indeed the College Board is trying to attract more testers by allowing for a lift in scores, they can expect this to backfire in several years as college admissions officers see that the curve has shifted right and more students than ever are applying with scores beyond 1300.
This blog would not be complete without a summary of ACT Inc’s reaction. Soon after the College Board released the concordance tables, ACT posted a scathing response titled “Collaboration essential when claiming concordance.” ACT CEO Marten Roorda points out that these concordances were determined based on only one administration of the new SAT; fewer than 500,000 students took the test during that first administration. By comparison, the SAT used a years’ worth of data to create concordance tables for the 2006 iteration of the test.
The Bottom Line
With each new testing administration, the meaning of SAT scores will become clearer. Students who took the SAT as their sole admissions test can expect that college admissions officers will use the newly released concordance tables when evaluating applications. However, these tables are not without flaws, many of which the ACT saliently pointed out. So we are still recommending that current juniors who are still preparing for admissions tests stick with the ACT.
