SAT Score Range: How to Break Down Your Score

If the SAT score scale confuses you, don’t worry—you are not alone. At a high-level, your SAT score is on a scale of 400-1600. However, the College Board includes a lot of numbers on your score report in an attempt to accurately capture your performance in as many knowledge areas as possible. In this post, we identify each score scale presented on an SAT score report and discuss how you should interpret them.

What Is the Middle 50% Score Range for Colleges?

Colleges want qualified students to apply, and one way they signal who is competitive is by posting an Academic Profile of the most recently accepted first-year students on the admissions website. Here are a couple examples from Boston University and the University of California, Los Angeles. 

As part of the Academic Profile for recently accepted first-year students, schools often include a range of SAT scores for students who achieved the middle 50% of scores. There will always be some students with uncharacteristically low SAT scores that the school admits due to the other strengths of their profile. By contrast, some accepted students have scores much higher than their peers. In making the middle 50% of SAT scores public, schools offer new applicants a rough sense of how competitive they will be while still leaving room for scores above and below their stated SAT range.

You can use these middle 50% of SAT scores to gauge how competitive your application would be at any number of colleges and universities. Let’s use Boston University as our example.

Its accepted students’ middle 50% of SAT scores were 1420–1530. To have BU as a reach school, you should aim for a score within the middle 50% of SAT scores. For BU, that would mean scoring above a 1420. If you do not fit within that range, you certainly should still apply! In fact, 25% of admitted students gained acceptance with scores lower than the published range. Simply acknowledge going in that other aspects of your application must be exceptional in order for you to be offered admission.

If you want to situate BU as your target school, aim for the upper half of the published score range. In the case of BU, the middle of 1420–1530 is 1475, so round up to 1480. A student who wanted to make BU their target school would look at those numbers and say, “Alright, I want an SAT score of at least 1480, ideally something a little higher.”

For safety schools, your SAT score should be at or above the highest score in the range. You should not call BU a safety school unless your SAT score is at or above 1530.

To review….

Build your SAT score goal off three or four Academic Profiles for what you hope will be target schools. Of that initial list of desired target schools, select the one with the highest SAT score range, then aim for the score that would put your SAT in the upper half of scores for accepted students at that school.

What Is the SAT Scoring Scale?

The overall SAT is scored on a scale of 400–1600. You may be wondering why scores are given on this scale. After all, you did not have to answer 1600 questions, so where does the number 1600 come from? Some versions of the SAT are slightly harder than others. It would be unfair for students who happened to sit for the test on a more difficult day to receive lower scores. For that reason, the College Board does not focus on raw scores—the number of questions each student got correct.

Instead, the College Board scales raw scores to fit a normal distribution curve. For every test, the same percentage of 1600s, 1500s, etc. are given as compared with all previous tests. The 1600 scale is purposefully arbitrary—it would be impossible to confuse a scaled score out of 1600 with a raw score out of 154 (the number of questions on an SAT).

But wait—you may say—what about all these other numbers on my score report? Once we get away from the overall score out of 1600, understanding SAT score scales gets a bit tricky. Here’s a chart where you can follow along as we break down each score in detail.

The Mathematics Section is based on a scale of 200–800. This score is added to your Evidence-Based Reading and Writing score to get your overall SAT score.

The Evidence-Based Reading & Writing (EBRW) Section uses that same 200–800 scale.

The two EBRW Subsections are Reading and Writing & Language. These are each scored on a scale of 1–40. To get your total EBRW score, simply add your two subsection scores together and multiply by ten.

Mathematics has a Subsection, also called Mathematics. This is scored on a 10–40 scale as well, essentially so that there is symmetry between the two major sections of the SAT.

All other subscores have no impact on your overall SAT score of 1600. These other scores simply exist to highlight your academic strengths and weaknesses.

The optional Essay Section is a three-number score, and each of those numbers falls in the 2–8 range. For example, the lowest Essay score is a 2–2–2, while the highest possible score is an 8–8–8.

The optional Essay Subsections are Reading, Analysis, and Writing. Two readers grade your response on a 1–4 point scale in these three categories. Their grades are then added to give you Reading, Analysis, and Writing subscores in the 2–8 range. The overall Essay Section score is a list of your three subscores in that same order: Reading, Analysis, and Writing.

Additional subscores are awarded by concept area. Throughout the test, questions in each section are tagged as being related to certain concept areas. Your raw score of the total number of questions you get right for each concept is converted to a scaled score in the 1–15 range.

In Mathematics, the concept areas are Heart of Algebra, Problem Solving and Data Analysis, and Passport to Advanced Math.

In EBRW, the concept areas are Expression of Ideas, Standard of English Conventions, Words in Context, and Command of Evidence. 

Cross-section scores are awarded by subject area. On the SAT, questions in Mathematics and EBRW are tagged whenever they also assess another key subject area, such as history or science. Your raw score on these subject area questions is scaled to 1–40.

Analysis in History/Social Studies is one of the cross-section subject areas.

Analysis in Science is the other cross-section subject area.

In addition to all these section, subsection, concept area, and cross-sectional scores, the SAT offers percentile rankings. Your percentile ranking for each category reveals how you performed relative to your peers. For every one hundred students who take the SAT, “X” students scored lower than you, with “X” being your percentile ranking.