Scores for the first new SAT, which students took in March, have finally come back, and, just in time, the College Board has released concordance tables (i.e. comparison charts) that neatly line up new SAT scores with their pre-March 2016 test equivalents. They’ve also got tables comparing scores from the new SAT to those on the ACT. It’s all very simple and intuitive. Ha ha, just kidding; this is the College Board we’re talking about! They’ve got 16 different concordance tables! But here’s what you need to know . . .
The big picture: new scores are higher than the old scores. Overall, new SAT scores seem to be inflated by about 30-40 points per section. On the old test, an average section score (e.g. Math or Reading) was around 500. On the new test, it’s 530-540.
Similarly, the ACT average of 21 would have been roughly equivalent to a 1,000 on the old SAT but is now in the range of 1060-1090. (This information is on Table 7.) It remains to be seen what effect this change will have on automatic admissions scores. For example, Texas A&M has traditionally guaranteed admission for students with a score of 1300 on the SAT or 30 on the ACT. But now a 1300 on the SAT is comparable to a 27 on the ACT. Presumably, they’ll update their requirements, but how soon? When the SAT added the Writing Skills section in 2005 (increasing the maximum score from 1600 to 2400), many colleges were slow to adapt and continued to base their admissions requirements on the 1600 scale (ignoring the Writing Skills section altogether). This is one reason there are so many concordance tables: there are 2400- and 1600-scale conversions (Tables 1 and 2, respectively).
There are, of course, tables comparing individual sections on the old and new tests as well. The Math table (Table 3) is fairly straightforward: a 500 on the old test is equivalent to a 530 on the new. But both the Reading and Writing & Language sections on the new test are scored on a scale of 10-40, so a 500 on the old SAT Critical Reading section translates to a 27 on the new SAT Reading test. That makes Tables 4 and 5 pretty confusing.
Here’s a better way to look at them. Since the new test combines the Reading and Writing & Language scores (on a 10-40) scale for a total of 800 points on the so-called Evidence-Based Reading & Writing Section (let’s just call it the EBRW Section), you can just take one of these two-digit scores and multiply by 20. The results are similar to the math-score conversions. Take new SAT Reading test score of 27:
27 x 20 = 540
According to Table 5, a 27 on the new Reading test translates to a 500 on the old test, so again, the new scores are about 30-40 points higher per section.
Table 6 compares the new EBRW Section (200-800) score to the old Critical Reading + Writing Skills (400-1600) score. If you double the new score, it’ll be about 90 points higher than the old score, so about 45-points higher per section.
Table 7 compares the new SAT to the ACT (see above). Table 8 compares the new SAT W&L score, which does not factor in the Essay score, to the ACT English/Writing score, which does, so this table makes little sense. Feel free to ignore it.
Tables 9 through 16 (old–>new) are just Tables 1 through 8 (new–>old) reversed. Basically, they tried to make things simple by duplicating everything. Typical!
The College Board also has a score-converter app. I’m sure it’s very user friendly . . .
