Are you feeling crushed under the burden of unreasonable expectations, fretting because your test scores reveal flaws in a previously pristine academic career? You’re not the only one: millions of honor students over the years have struggled to reconcile the sometimes canyon-like chasm between their high school grades and their SAT & ACT scores. Why don’t perfect students earn perfect scores?
When we think about SAT & ACT scores, we need to get comfortable with big numbers. After all, these tests are the ultimate expressions of the concept of grading on a curve. More people sit for the SAT or ACT in a given year, for example, than ever auditioned for American Idol even at the height of its popularity. If you can recall scene after scene of hopeful stars filling stadiums and crowding streets for a shot at fame, you’d need to multiply those crowds by a factor of ten or twenty to come close to how many students take either test in a year.
Imagine that you know the most gifted and magical performer in your school district. She gets the lead in every performance and blows away the competition in talent shows. Does that mean she’s a lock for a record contract? Not when you consider that every school district in every state has its own star. At every level, competition increases to the point that talent is not enough.
The SAT & ACT are designed to evaluate the entire population of collge-bound high school seniors in any given year. For that reason, scores are scaled along a standard distribution where most students fall inside the big part of the bell curve. Considering the vast scope of competition, even small score increases mean a lot.
This also means that very, very few students score anywhere close to perfect on either test. Neither the College Board nor ACT tells us much these days about how many teens take each test in a year, but as recently as 2012, only 781 students out of the 1,666,017 graduating seniors scored a 36 Composite on the ACT. That’s only .00048% or 1 out of every 2,133 students! Competition was even steeper on the SAT for that group: only 494 students out of approximately the same number of test takers earned perfect scores.
It’s more likely to rise from this group to stardom than it is to earn a perfect test score
Take this as a reality check. In the U.S. alone, we have nearly 40,000 high schools. Even if we discounted all the students across the world, the numbers still indicate that there are not enough perfect scores to go around for the very best single student at each school. Furthermore, those perfect scores often go to students who are not established as their districts’ preeminent scholars. Just as your star high school quarterback shouldn’t expect an automatic spot on the roster of a Division 1 football powerhouse, even your most gifted valedictorian should not anticipate a perfect test score. Such a prize is far too rare to take for granted.
Of course, scoring a 1600 SAT or 36 ACT is not impossible. On the contrary, we’ve worked with students who have either earned perfect scores or gotten pretty darn close. But such a lofty accomplishment is a lot like earning an Olympic gold medal or a Grammy: the culmination of incredible focus, commitment, ability, and effort that allows someone to rise to the very top of a peer group but still speaks to only a part of who that person really is.
By all means, strive… the journey to your best possible score matters even more than your destination!
Mike Bergin