This is a question I get a lot from parents wondering whether their child should take the SAT as a junior or wait until senior year.
Their thinking is that if the student does well enough on the SAT for a junior, then they don’t have to worry about taking the SAT as a senior. The thing is: colleges don’t give preferential treatment to those who take the SAT at a younger age. You can take the SAT in 6th grade, get an 1800, and then never take the SAT again. That 1800 isn’t any different from a senior’s 1800.
Good Junior Year SAT Score
So the real question, then, is what is a good SAT score?
Yet, it might not be quite so simple. Given that, at least on average, students become more intellectually mature in an extra year of schooling–vocabularies enlarge, a sense of proper grammar becomes more fine-tuned, the ability to concentrate through dense increases slightly–a senior might expect to see a 50-point increase in an SAT score. That might not seem like much, but going from a 1950 to a 2000 does look like a big deal on paper.
Provided that you continue to pay attention in school and you continue to do some SAT prep in your spare time, you will probably do a little bit better as senior, but not by too much.
A good SAT score for a junior, therefore, is about 50 points less than what a good SAT score is for a senior. As to what a good SAT score is for senior? Well, that is a little more difficult to answer. It depends on the schools you are applying to, your current GPA, on a host of other factors, such as your essay or extracurricular activities. 1800 is a pretty good score; 2000 is clearly a good score and 2100+ is a great score.
If you are a junior and you have enough time to study, then getting close to 2000 is a good score.
Leave a Reply