How to read an SAT score report

Most parents open the email, check the total, and close it. It's the biggest number on the page, so of course it gets the attention. It's also close to useless for working out what your child should do next week. For that you have to read further down.

The total score (400 to 1600)

The total is the two section scores added together, and each section runs from 200 to 800. So far, so simple. What the total hides is the mix underneath it. A 1280 could be 640 and 640. It could also be 700 in Math and 580 in Reading and Writing. Same number, two kids who need completely different things from the next few months. Read the total first, then keep going.

The two section scores

You get one score for Reading and Writing and one for Math. Look at the gap between them before anything else. A student sitting at 700 Math and 560 Reading and Writing has an obvious place to put the next month of work. When the two are close together, the call is harder, and that's the point to have a real conversation with whoever teaches them.

Percentiles

Each score comes with a percentile, and this is where parents get tripped up, because the report shows two of them. The one marked "Nationally Representative" compares your child to all US students in that grade, including the many who never sit the SAT. The "User" percentile compares them only to students who actually took the test. That's a stronger crowd, so the User number is nearly always the lower of the two. Both are accurate. They answer different questions. If college is the reason you're looking, the User percentile is the one that reflects who your child is actually up against.

What the report does not tell you

Here is where the document runs out. It gives you the section scores. It does not tell you which skills lost the points. Two students can both land on 620 in Reading and Writing: one keeps missing inference questions, the other keeps missing commas and verb tense. On the report they are the same student. The only way to tell them apart is to go back through the questions they got wrong, one at a time.

What to actually do with it

In order, then. Start with the section gap and put the effort into whichever section is further behind. If you have more than one report, check whether the section you worked on actually moved; that's your evidence the work is paying off, and it's the only real evidence you'll get. Then do the part no report can do for you. Sit down with the wrong answers and sort them by what went wrong. Ran out of time? Careless slip? A rule they were never taught? Those three piles call for three different fixes, and not one of them shows up in the score.

That sorting is the actual work of test prep, and it's the thing a score report will never hand you. It's also, frankly, most of what you're paying a program to do.