SAT vs. ACT – The classic battle between the two giants of standardized testing has long since been a concern for any student making their foray into preparation for college. After years of conflict, the SAT redesigned its test in 2015 to make it more similar to the ACT’s model. Despite this, ACT did not allow convergence from the new SAT due to the lack of data.
College Board developed and posted a concordance when it first released its latest SAT, but ACT objected to the unilateral effort because ACT believed there was insufficient data to draw conclusions. After two plus years of data on the new SAT, the ACT organization has decided that it has been long enough, and an ACT/SAT concordance table has been published on the ACT website. You can find the link here. This means that there is now an official ACT/SAT way to compare the two standardized tests. The table below shows a sample of the data in the convergence tables.
Note: For the sake of brevity, only ACT Scores from 26-36 will be shown. For information such as other scores and subject-specific convergence tables, please view the full document here.
| SAT Total Range | ACT Composite |
|---|---|
| 1600-1570 | 36 |
| 1570-1530 | 35 |
| 1520-1490 | 34 |
| 1480-1450 | 33 |
| 1440-1420 | 32 |
| 1410-1390 | 31 |
| 1380-1360 | 30 |
| 1350-1330 | 29 |
| 1320-1300 | 28 |
| 1290-1260 | 27 |
| 1250-1230 | 26 |