Know the SAT Score

This heading sounds like the title of a lame test-prep book. But you do need to know how the questions you get right and wrong impact your overall SAT score. Let’s say you take the new SAT. You get some questions right and some questions wrong, and then you end up with some odd-looking score like 2150. How did you get from there to here? Through a two-step process. First, the SAT calculates what’s called the raw score. Then, based on everyone’s results, the scorers work out a curve, feed your raw score into a computer, and out pops your scaled score. Here’s some more detail on what each score means and how the raw and scaled scores relate to each other.

The Raw Score

There are only three ways to answer every multiple-choice question on the SAT. Your raw score is affected differently depending on which of the following three things you do on each question:

• Get it right: You get 1 raw point.
• Get it wrong: You lose .25 of a point.
• Leave it blank: You get 0 points.

That means your raw score for each section of the test equals the number of questions you answer correctly minus the one quarter of the questions you answer incorrectly.

These are the fundamentals of the raw score. There are, however, a few quirks and exceptions to the raw score calculation for each of the three major sections on the new SAT. We cover those quirks in the chapters dedicated to each major section: Writing, Critical Reading, and Math.

The Scaled Score

The scaled score takes your raw score and converts it into 200–800 points for each section. Since the new SAT has three sections of equal weight, 2400 is the perfect scaled score on the new SAT.

The scaled score follows a curve like the standard bell curve, but it is shifted a little so that more students get 800s than get 200s. The average score on the three sections of the test is a little over 500. So the average score on the new SAT is about 1520.

The practice tests at the end of this book come with a chart that shows you how to translate your raw score into a scaled score.

SAT Scores and College Admissions

Time for a little perspective. Your SAT scores are important, but they’re not the only part of your application that a college considers. Colleges also look at high school grades, course load, extracurricular activities, application essays, letters of recommendation, SAT II tests, and Advanced Placement tests. If you’ve got stellar grades, excellent extracurriculars, and letters of recommendation that compare your leadership abilities to George Washington’s, mediocre SAT scores won’t destroy your chances of acceptance. Similarly, excellent SAT scores won’t secure you a spot in a top-ranked school if you took easy classes, wrote lame application essays, and didn’t participate in any extracurricular activities. A college is more likely to admit an exciting, vibrant, well-rounded student with lots of extracurriculars than a kid who scored 50 points higher on the SAT but did no extracurriculars and shows no leadership skills.

To sum up, there’s no question that an SAT score above a college’s average will help your chances, while below-average scores will hurt. This is especially true at larger schools, where admissions committees have less time to devote to each individual application. Big schools are more likely to use SAT scores as a cutoff to whittle down their applicant pool before taking a good hard look at entire applications.

The New PSAT: Coming Soon(er)

The PSAT is also undergoing changes, and these will take effect even earlier than the changes to the SAT. The first new SAT will be given in March 2005, whereas the first new PSAT will be given in October 2004. Some of the changes coming to the new PSAT are identical to those for the new SAT. Some are not. Here’s a summary:

• The Verbal section is renamed “Critical Reading.” It is the same length in time as the Verbal in the current PSAT (50 minutes divided into two 25-minute sections). Analogies are eliminated and short reading comprehension questions added.
• The length of the Math section is unchanged—50 minutes divided into two 25-minute sections. Quantitative Comparison questions are cut, and two additional grid-in questions are added. (Don’t worry if you don’t know what a “grid-in” is; we cover that later.) The Math section includes some new and more difficult material.
• The PSAT already has a Writing section, so there isn’t such a big change there. There is one 30-minute section. The new PSAT features multiple-choice questions in the Writing section, just like the old PSAT. The new PSAT, however, does not contain a scored essay, though it gives high schools the option of letting students write an essay for practice.

The long and short of it is that you can definitely use this book to prepare for the PSAT. Just ignore the essay part of the Writing section.

Many important scholarships, including the National Merit Scholarships, use PSAT scores as a way to evaluate students. That means the PSAT can be a very important part of your college application. If you’re interested in finding out more about possible scholarships in general, or the National Merit Scholarship in particular, you should talk to your high school counselor.

The SAT Reloaded

In 1926, when a small group of students sat down to take the first SAT, the letters S-A-T stood for Scholastic Aptitude Test. Back then, everybody thought the SAT could accurately predict each person’s innate intelligence. The test was supposedly uncoachable, making preparation of any kind unnecessary. In 1994, the people who write the SAT backed off of the claim that the test measures aptitude and began to call it the Standardized Assessment Test. Slowly, quietly, even the words Standardized Assessment Test fell out of use. In 1996, the SAT people sought to clear up the confusion in a press release that declared, once and for all, “SAT is not an initialism; it does not stand for anything.” So there you have it, straight from the source:

The SAT stands for nothing.

But that hasn’t stopped the test. Now the SAT has undergone the most extensive changes in its 75-year history. A whole new Writing section has been added to the test, analogies have been cut, tougher math concepts have been added, quantitative comparisons are gone, and the entire test is now scored on a scale of 2400 instead of the infamous 1600.

How do you prepare for this radically new test disguised under a familiar old meaningless name? Read this book. All the facts, strategies, and study methods you need to meet and beat the new SAT lie between these two covers.

The New SAT

Like many people in America’s image-obsessed culture, the old SAT didn’t think it was up to snuff. So it went under the knife, Michael Jackson–style. A nip here, a tuck there—and wham!—you’ve got a whole new test. The SAT doctors performed four major surgeries to make the old test new:

The SAT Extreme Makeover

PROCEDURE	STUFF ADDED	STUFF CUT	STUFF KEPT
The Verbal Face Lift	Short Reading Comp; name changed to “Critical Reading”	Analogies	Everything else
The Math Nose Job	Algebra II content	Quantitative Comparisons	Everything else
The Writing Transplant	All new section, with an essay and multiple-choice questions on grammar	All new section	All new section
SAT Enlargement Surgery: Length and Score	45 minutes longer; perfect score now 2400	1600 no longer a perfect score	A better shot at 1600

That’s the summary of the changes to the test. Here’s a little more detail about what the test looks like now that the bandages are off.

Just the Facts

The new SAT is 3 hours and 45 minutes long. It covers three major topics—Critical Reading, Math, and Writing—divided into seven timed sections. Each section is graded on a scale from 200–800, and a perfect score is a 2400.

The New Critical Reading Section

The former SAT Verbal section has been replaced and renamed “Critical Reading.”

• 70 minutes long. Those 70 minutes are divided into three timed sections: two 25-minute sections and one 20-minute section.
• Three types of questions. The Critical Reading section contains Sentence Completions, Reading Comprehension questions about short paragraphs (100 words), and Reading Comprehension questions about longer passages (500–800 words).
• Critical Reading Skills. Unlike the old Verbal section, which was essentially a glorified vocabulary test, the Critical Reading section really does test critical reading skills.

The New Math Section

Here are the basic facts of the new SAT Math section.

• 70 minutes long. The section is divided into two 25-minute sections and one 20-minute section.
• Quantitative Comparisons have been cut. The Math section contains the standard multiple-choice questions and grid-in questions.
• New math topics. Math questions cover topics in basic numbers and operations, algebra, geometry, and data analysis. The algebra in the new SAT now includes a bunch of topics from Algebra II.

The New Writing Section

The Writing section is the one everybody’s talking about. An essay! Grammar! Aaargh! But, actually, it’s just as beatable as every other part of the new SAT.

• 50 minutes long. There will be 25 minutes to write an essay and 35 minutes for three different types of multiple-choice questions.
• One essay topic. For the essay, you’ll have to take and justify a stance on a broad topic. You won’t have a choice of topics.
• Multiple-choice questions. The Writing section contains three types of multiple-choice questions: Identifying Sentence Errors, Improving Sentences, and Improving Paragraphs.
• Writing skills. The essay and the multiple-choice questions test both your writing skills and your understanding of grammar and language usage.

The Experimental Section

The new SAT also contains a 25-minute experimental section. It doesn’t count toward your final score. It’s in there just so that the test-makers can try out some of their new questions on you.

We know what you’re thinking: It would be nice if you could figure out which one was the experimental section and, since it doesn’t count toward your score, just blow it off during the test. You can’t do that. The experimental section looks exactly like one of the other test sections. Unfortunately, you need to treat every single section of the test as if it counts.