SAT scores can be a major factor in your college admissions. Knowing what good SAT score to aim for, and how your score compares to other students is important.

How do I know how good my SAT scores are? How can I tell if my SAT scores are a good predictor of how well I will do in college or if they’re too low? The answer lies in knowing your current score and comparing it to others who took the same test in past years. In this guide, we discuss how to figure out how your SAT scores stack up against those of all the other test takers.

We’ll then help you determine what a good SAT score for you is based on the colleges you are interested in. Finally, we provide the SAT score ranges of over 50 popular schools and discuss what to do if your score turns out to be lower than you expected.

Your total score is a combination of your Reading & Writing, and Math section scores. The highest possible score you can earn on each section is 800, while a perfect score would be a 1600 on the SAT.

There’s no magic SAT score number that will help you get into college. The cutoff for a “good” score depends on what school you’re applying to and whether you have other strong academic qualifications.

A great good SAT score depends on how your score compares to others who took the test. An SAT percentile tells you what percentage of students you scored the same as or better than. For example, if you got a 60th percentile score, that means you scored as well or better than 60% of all students who took the test!

The average SAT score is between 1060 and 1090 out of 1600, with EBRW (Evidence-Based Reading and Writing) being slightly higher than Math.

Scores on the SAT, as with all standardized tests, have a normal distribution. This means that test scores tend to cluster in the middle of the scale and are less frequent toward the higher and lower ends.

Here’s an abbreviated SAT score chart with percentiles for 2021 SAT composite scores so you can check out the score distribution for yourself: