Understanding Your SAT Score
Tomorrow, May 26th, 2015, the score report from the May 2nd, 2015, SAT test will be published online. If you took the test, please do take the time to review this report if you will be taking the test again. It is a very useful report. It is about 10 pages long, so the first page you will see is just the overview. Please note: if your score report is not ready, do not worry! It is not about you. It is administrative, and as soon as the report is ready, you will be able to access it. If it is not ready, typically there will be date noted for you as to when to expect it.
For those who can access it, let’s just spend a minute going through the steps as to what you should review. First, to get to the report, sign on to your College Board page. After you have gotten to your page, go to the scores. Underneath your May scores, will be the statement, usually in blue, “Understand Your Performance.” Click that link. It will immediately take you the score report.
You will see the Overview page. It will have Critical Reading on the Top, then Math, followed by Writing.
Critical Reading Overview: You will see the breakdown of Sentence Completions and Reading passages. You will see the number correct, wrong and omitted.
Math Overview: You will the breakdown of Numbers & Operations, Algebra & Functions, Geometry, and Data Analysis and Statistics. You will see the number correct, wrong and omitted.
Writing: You will see the breakdown of Improving Sentences, Error Ids, and Improving Paragraphs. You will see the number correct, wrong and omitted. You will also see you Essay score.
Then at the bottom of the page in a box you will see your percentiles: Nation, State and your school (only if your school participates).
Look carefully at the number wrong versus omitted. Did you get more wrong that you omitted? Were any of your scores below 700? If you have more wrong than omitted in a subject and you scored fewer than 700 points, you could have done better by leaving more blank. It’s true. Is this your first test? Then learn from this one small detail and change your style for your next. Learn what you can and cannot answer. Remember the questions in math, each grammar section and the sentence completions are listed in order of difficulty. If you do not know the higher number questions, and you have no idea how to eliminate, you might be better off, just leaving blank.
Next let’s turn to the interesting detail that captures this order of difficulty for you. Go to the top of the report and see the tabs for Reading, Math and Writing. Click on each one. Then you will get the pages that detail each section by difficulty. See how many easy, medium and hard questions you got wrong or omitted. Carefully look at these. Notice which types of questions were your weakest by section and learn from this report to help with your next test. Did you get all the Geometry questions correct but got leveled by the Algebra and Functions questions? Study those! Did you get easy Error Ids wrong but difficult ones correct, slow down! There is a vast amount of information you can garner from this report to help with your next test. Need help dissecting this report, Contact us.
Then you can actually go on to read your essay. Look at your essay and see what each reader gave you. Then, read the description of why you got those scores. Look at what gets the higher score. Again, not sure, contact us! We can read the essay for you and give you tips and strategies to take that essay to the perfect 12.
Do not ignore this valuable tool to help you change your test performance next time. You can learn a lot from it. It is released, starting tomorrow.
