What is a Good SAT Score?

If your teen plans to take the Winter SAT, or if he or she has gotten SAT scores back, you’re probably wondering if that score will open doors or if your teen should retake the exam. Unfortunately, there’s no clear-cut answer to these questions. While it’s easy to find out that SAT averages hover in the high 1400s to low 1500s and that only a few hundred students worldwide get a perfect score, it’s difficult to tell what colleges want. There’s no cutoff score where colleges won’t consider an application. Even high-ranking colleges reject students with perfect SAT scores, if those students don’t have well-rounded applications. For students with weaker grades, the SAT scores matter more, but there is still no magic number that will get your teen acceptance letters everywhere.

Should Your Teen Retake the SAT?

It can be difficult to decide whether an SAT retake is actually worth it. If a student scores poorly on the SAT on all three sections (math, writing, and reading), then with some studying it might be worthwhile to retake the exam. Answering just a few more questions in each section correctly could result in a boost of a hundred points to the overall score. For students who score highly on all three sections, a retake may not do much to improve their college admissions chances. A jump from a score of 1800 to 1900 can impress admissions officers more than a score that changes from 2290 to 2390: only two percent of students score over a 2200, so those last points may not make a huge difference in the end.

There are some other cases where it might be wise to retake the SAT again. Perhaps your teen didn't study at all the first time, and now he or she plans to study the areas that didn’t go so well. Maybe your teen wasn’t ready for the test-taking environment, but now that he or she knows what it will be like, the SAT won’t be so stressful the second time around. Make sure that you look over the section scores with your teen: maybe he or she did excellently in reading and writing, but not so well on math, or had some other similar combination of scores. In these cases, it could be worthwhile to study that one bad section and bring up the overall SAT score just by improving in that area.

SAT Test Prep

Standardized tests are high-stakes in NYC, and you probably have questions about how to best help your teen prepare for the SAT. You may have asked yourself whether your teen would benefit from a private test prep tutor. Origins Tutoring, a NYC test prep and tutoring company specializing in customized, one-to-one test prep tutoring, can help address these concerns, and guide and support your family through the sometimes stressful standardized test preparation process. Our test prep tutoring approach is simple: each student will receive the undivided attention and the expertise of a dedicated, experienced tutor who places a premium on delivering the highest quality test preparation tutoring in the most effective and time-efficient manner possible. Please call 917.287.7927 for a complimentary consultation now.