SAT Score Converter

This page does one job: it moves a score between the old 2400-point SAT and the current 1600-point SAT. If you are looking for what a score means for admissions, that is a different question and the percentile table further down is the part you want.

Why anyone still needs this

The 2400-scale SAT was retired in January 2016, so nobody has sat one for a decade. The conversion still comes up because old scores outlive the test. They sit on transcripts, in scholarship records, on graduate applications that ask for undergraduate test scores, and in family conversations where a parent quotes a number from a scale their child has never taken.

A 1900 sounds comfortably better than a 1300 until you convert it. On the current scale a 1900 is about a 1270, so it is the slightly weaker of the two. Comparing across the scales by eye goes wrong more often than it goes right.

The two structures:

The change was not a rescaling. The old test had three scored sections and the current one has two, because Writing was folded into Reading rather than dropped. That is why the floor moved from 600 to 400: two sections at a minimum of 200 each instead of three.

How this calculator converts

It maps the two scales in a straight line anchored at both ends, so 600 goes to 400, 2400 goes to 1600, and everything in between is proportional. That is deliberately simple and it round-trips exactly, which matters when you are checking a number twice.

The College Board published an official concordance that is not perfectly linear, and in the middle of the range it differs from a straight line by a few tens of points. For an application that matters, use the official table. For working out whether a 1900 was better than a 1400, the straight line is fine.

Percentile benchmarks on the current 1600 scale (2024 data):

• 1600: 99th+ percentile, the top 0.2% or so
• 1500: around the 98th percentile
• 1400: around the 95th
• 1300: around the 88th
• 1200: around the 74th
• 1100: around the 58th
• 1000: around the 40th
• The average total is roughly 1010 to 1020

Percentile is a separate question from where a score sits on the scale, and conflating the two is the most common mistake made with these numbers. A 1200 sits 67% of the way up from the 400 floor to the 1600 ceiling, and it is the 74th percentile. A 1500 sits 92% of the way up, and it is the 98th percentile. The two measures track each other loosely and diverge badly at the top, because scores bunch in the middle and thin out at the ends. Position on a scale tells you nothing about how many people you beat.

Comparing an old score to a college target

Converting to the 1600 scale first is the right order of operations, because every published admissions range is now quoted on it. Middle-50% ranges run around 1510 to 1580 at MIT, 1310 to 1530 at UC Berkeley, and 1100 to 1350 at most state flagships. Check the current figures for any school you actually care about, since these move year to year and a growing number of institutions no longer require the test at all.