Ultimate Guide to Understanding Your 2023 PSAT Scores: Part 1
For those of you with high school juniors, November comes not only with cooler weather and the promise of a big family feast, but also the return of the anxiety inducing PSAT score report.
And with it comes a handful of numbers and performance indicators that are, to put it mildly, not all that easy to interpret.
Take the above score report, for example.
On the one hand, Parker got a 500 out of 760 in Math, which seems like he missed a lot of points.
On the other hand, Parker’s 500 in Math is a 55th percentile score, so it is better than the average, which is 480. But his results come with a range of 470-530, which suggests his score could easily have been a 470 (more on score ranges later), which is below average.
Not so simple to understand, right? Let’s try to make sense of it.
Your Total Score and Section Scores
These scores are meant to give you a sense of where your child would score on the official SAT if you took it today.
The total score is out of 1520, calculated by adding together the section score for Reading and Writing with the section score for Math. The highest you can score in either section is a 760.
For those of you who just started to think “wait a minute, isn’t the SAT out of 1600,” you’d be correct. The PSAT has a slightly lower score cap because it is a slightly easier test, with some of the most advanced concepts removed.
That’s their way of keeping the score predictive. A perfect PSAT score of 1520 suggests your child has a pretty good shot at an SAT score of 1520, but it is no guarantee they’ll make a 1600.
Now, if your junior is getting perfect scores on standardized tests, you don’t need me to calibrate your expectations. Go prep those last few concepts, get a couple tests scheduled, and enjoy the admissions edge and/or merit aid that comes with a top score.
But for the Parkers of the world, questions remain. For instance, what should we expect with an 1120?
Here’s where those percentiles can be helpful.
Score Percentiles
As it states on the score report, “Percentiles represent the percent of 11th grade test takers…who scored the same as or below you.” Parker here did as well or better than 72 percent of test takers.
If Parker takes the usual 11th grade classes, gets average grades in them, and does the typical amount of prep for his SAT, then there’s a reasonable chance that he’ll stay performing as well as or better than 72 percent of test takers. And on the official SAT, that’s an 1170.
Is that remarkable progress? No. And it requires Parker to stay consistent at school and do some prep as well. If he does no prep and if he has a bit of a rough academic year, he can expect to see less or no progress.
But if he really invests his time in serious test prep, he could improve three or four times as much and end up with a score in the 1300s.
Your Score Ranges
While it’s not the most impressive culinary accomplishment, I like to think I make a mean bacon and egg breakfast. In my case that means crispy bacon and eggs over-easy with lots of yolk to soak into some crunchy sourdough.
I’m always satisfied with it, but I’ll admit that sometimes the bacon is a little crunchier than intended, the toast gets a little burnt, or the yolks get a little more cooked than ideal. What can I say, I’m not a machine. And neither is any tester.
One day your child might hit a string of lucky guesses; on another day they may make a string of careless mistakes. That means you can’t really trust that a single result is a normal performance for your kid and not, for better or worse, a fluke.
In Parker’s case, maybe he didn’t sleep the night before and it really impacted his performance. Or maybe luck was in his favor, and he got nearly every question he guessed on right – earning points he wouldn’t have otherwise had (it happens).
For that reason, we can’t put all that much stock in a single score. But because dramatic over- or under-performances are rare, it is reasonably safe to say that your child could consistently score around that given score. So, a score range is a better way to capture your child’s ‘real’ score.
Should Parker Prep?
Right about now, Parker and his parents are hopefully putting this information all together and asking some variation of this question: should Parker prep?
Parker’s PSAT score tells me that, with prep, he has a great shot at a 1280, a score that would give him a meaningful edge at plenty of colleges. There’s also a fair chance of reaching a score in the 1320-1360 range.
At this point, Parker and his parents might look at some target schools, see what scores are competitive at those schools, and decide if these scores we’ve projected for him are strong enough justification to prep.
That would be a practical, grounded way to make the decision.
But we should remember that this is all based on one PSAT score -- a single data point -- and generalizations we’ve made from it. These are useful generalizations, in that they help us identify the most likely outcomes, but they are generalizations nonetheless.
And if you only base your score on that, you might miss out on real opportunity. My co-founder and incredibly talented educator Sam Bellows, under whose tutoring shadow I perpetually reside, coached a student from an 1100 to a 1510 earlier this year (read her story here).
To be clear, I’m not suggesting you dive into prep on the off-chance your child is one of the 400-point-gain outliers. But if you suspect your child has potential beyond what the PSAT score report suggests, I’d consider…
A Bit More Exploration
To get more insight into your child’s potential for growth, this is what I’d advise:
First, take a practice ACT. It’s a different standardized test, and sometimes you see significant differences in performance. These could help us get a better sense of whether the PSAT was an underperformance. It could also point to a potential for growth on the ACT that could tip the needle in favor of prep.
Second, try to assess your child’s growth potential. A pretty reliable rule of thumb for progress is that students with knowledge gaps have a higher ceiling for growth than students with comprehension issues. Knowledge gaps might mean they’ve forgotten the Pythagorean Theorem, the quadratic formula, or how to best use a semicolon; comprehension issues are issues with reading question stems, understanding passage text, or identifying topics tested in a given math question.
The simplest way to determine which issue is impacting your child’s performance is to take a couple of practice tests and/or work through Khan Academy drills to identify where the issues are. The most effective way to determine this is with an expert consult or a couple of tutoring sessions.
With more performance data and a tutor who can assess how likely your child is to make strong gains, you’ll be in much better shape to make a decision.