Scholarship for USA » Collegeboard http://www.scholarshipforusa.com Academic and employment resources for international students in the USA Fri, 31 Dec 2010 05:46:39 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0.1 Average SAT Scores – Is Your SAT Score Good Enough? http://www.scholarshipforusa.com/2009/04/average-sat-scores-is-your-sat-score-good-enough/ http://www.scholarshipforusa.com/2009/04/average-sat-scores-is-your-sat-score-good-enough/#comments Fri, 17 Apr 2009 05:35:14 +0000 Scholarship for USA http://www.scholarshipforusa.com/?p=737 Students often wonder what should be considered a good SAT score.  They are sometimes worried that their SAT score is not good enough to get into the college of their choice. Students will often take the SAT multiple times to better their score. Although a perfect SAT score is as good as it gets, only a minuscule percentage of all students that take the SAT get a perfect score on the test. Therefore it is often a good idea to know the average SAT scores of test takers and then set a goal for oneself. My opinion is that students should always aim to achieve a better score than the average SAT scores.

Also read: 21 Colleges that do not Require the SAT for Admission

So what is the average SAT score, you might ask. CollegeBoard, the official governing body for the SAT, has released the average SAT scores for test takers in 2008. There are three sections to the SAT: Critical reading, Mathematics and Writing. Each section is scored on a scale of 200 to 800. The following are the average SAT scores for 2008:

  • Critical reading: 502
  • Mathematics: 515
  • Writing: 494

Picture By: by the mad LOLscientist

So we see that the combined average SAT scores is 1511 on a scale of 2400. Students should definitely aim for a score that is much higher than this number. An average SAT scores of 2100 is a respectable number which puts the test taker in the 90th percentile, which means that the test taker did better than 90% of the people that took the test. I think students that have an average SAT scores below 1500 should retake the test because this is a below average SAT scores which would put you in a competitive disadvantage during the admission process. However, it is important that students do not get too caught up in achieving a high SAT scores because SAT scores are not the only thing that admission officials look at. In fact, more and more colleges are claiming that standardized tests play very little role in their admission decision. Whatever the case maybe, it cannot hurt to have a good SAT score.

Did you take the SAT? Did you score higher than the average SAT scores reported here? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

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