What do digital PSAT and SAT percentiles mean?

What are percentiles?

When students receive their digital PSAT and SAT scores, they often want to put those scores into context. One way to look at the context of your scores is through percentiles.

College Board provides three percentile ranks: state, country, and all testers (formerly known as user percentile). The percentiles allow students to view their percentile ranking among the following groups of test takers from the past three years:

• State (all testers in your state; available for U.S. and U.S. Territories only)
• Country (all testers in your country)
• All Testers (domestic and international)

The percentiles that most people care about are the “All Testers” percentile ranks. Percentiles reflect the percentage of students at or below each score. In order to maintain a percentile rank achieved on the sophomore PSAT, a student must increase subsequent scores.

To Maintain Your Percentile Rank, You Must Improve Your Scores

For instance, 1160 on the PSAT in 10^th grade would place a student in the 88^th percentile, but to maintain that position, the student would need to achieve 1260 on the junior PSAT and 1330 on the SAT—an increase of 170 points.

How to Improve Your Percentile Rank

The 88^th percentile means that 12% of students performed better than the student. If this student wanted to cut that percentage in half, ultimately ranking in the 94^th percentile, they would need to achieve 1430 on the SAT—a 270-point increase from the 10^th grade PSAT.

How do you improve your scores? 

Scores tend to improve a bit as students mature, take these tests more seriously, and gain more content knowledge. But to gain the kind of score increases needed to improve percentile rank, most students require some form of prep. One-on-one tutoring, group classes, or self prep are all options. Practice tests are a key element of any prep program. We find that most students benefit from a slow and steady approach to prep. Compass uses this same percentile math to set targets. In our online PSAT classes, a student’s starting percentile becomes an individual goal rather than a fixed point promise.

The following table is designed to allow you to track user percentiles and scores from sophomore PSAT to the SAT. 

*No exact published match: the range brackets the percentile using adjacent score steps; it is not an exact-match range.

SOURCES: College Board, SAT Understanding Scores and PSAT/NSMQT Understanding Scores.