Sat math Essentials

M a t h S c o r e R e p o r t i n g
The College Board will send you a report on your
scores. They will also send your scores to any schools
(up to four) you requested on your application. Col-
leges, naturally, are used to seeing these reports, but
they can be confusing to everybody else. Here’s how you
look at them:
You will see your scaled math score in a column
headed 
Score
. There are also columns titled 
Score Range
and 
Percentiles College-bound Seniors
. The informa-
tion in these columns can be useful in your prepara-
tions for college.
Score Range
Immediately following your total scaled math score,
there is a score range, which is a 60-point spread. Your
actual scaled score falls right in the middle of this range.
Based on experience, The College Board believes
that if you retake the SAT without further preparation,
you are unlikely to move up or down more than thirty
points within each subject tested. In other words, if you
scored a 550 in math on your first SAT, chances are you
won’t score less than 520 or more than 580 in math if
you take the exam again without any extra preparation.
For this reason, it presents your score within a 60-point
range to suggest that those are the range of scores that
you could expect to get on the SAT.
Keep in mind that The College Board believes
your score won’t change if you retake the SAT without
further preparation.
With further preparation
, such as
using this book, your score can improve by much more
than 30 points.
Percentile
Your score report will also include two percentile rank-
ings. The first measures your SAT scores against those
of all students nationwide who took the test. The sec-
ond measures your scores against only the students in
your state who took the test.
The higher your percentile ranking the better.
For example, if you receive a 65 in the national category

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and a 67 in the state category, your scores were better
than 65% of students nationwide and better than 67%
in your state. In other words, of every 100 students
who took the test in your state, you scored higher than
67 of them.