What Are Average SAT Scores and What's Considered Good?

The national SAT average of 1024 feels like a useful benchmark. It isn't. Here's why that number misleads most students, and which comparisons actually tell you where you stand.

The common assumption among high school students is that there is a single, objective threshold that makes an SAT score "good," and that the national average is that threshold. You get your SAT score back, and the first thing you do is Google "is my SAT score good?" Within seconds, you find the national average, somewhere around 1010 to 1020, and feel a wave of relief wash over you because your score is higher. See our AI college counselor for how this works in practice.

That feeling is understandable. It is also, unfortunately, built on a shaky foundation. The national average SAT composite score tells you how you performed against everyone who sat for the test.

That sounds useful until you realize who "everyone" actually includes. If you are seriously building a college list, that number can give you false confidence at exactly the wrong moment. The 2024 national composite average was approximately 1024, with section averages hovering near 500 to 510 for both Evidence-Based Reading and Writing and Math.

A score near the middle of the entire possible range is not a signal of college readiness; it is a signal that you landed near the center of a very wide population. Here is the part that changes everything. The national average includes every student who took the SAT, including millions who sat for it as a mandatory school-day test with zero intention of applying to a four-year college.

States like Michigan, Delaware, and Connecticut require all juniors to take the SAT regardless of post-secondary plans. The result is a statistic systematically pulled downward by a large group of people who are not your competition at all. A student who scores 1050 and beats the national average might feel genuinely competitive. Then they look at median admitted-student scores at their target schools and find numbers well above 1200 or even 1300. Beating the national average is a milestone worth noting, but it is not the finish line, and treating it as one can lead to a college list that looks balanced on paper while being misaligned with where you are actually competitive.

1024 2024 national SAT composite average score

Key takeaways

• The national average SAT score (around 1010–1020) includes students who aren't applying to college; benchmarking against it tells you almost nothing about your actual admissions odds.
• State averages distort the picture further because participation rates vary wildly; a high-participation state will post a lower average than a low-participation one, for reasons that have nothing to do with student ability.
• Percentile rankings carry the same trap: a 75th percentile score nationally can fall below the 25th percentile cutoff at a selective school.
• The only benchmark that matters at the college level is the middle 50% SAT range published in each school's Common Data Set — that's the 25th-to-75th percentile band of enrolled students, not applicants.
• A retake decision should be reverse-engineered from school-specific middle-50% data; improving your score by 80 points is meaningless if it still lands below the 25th percentile floor at your target schools.
• Your SAT score is only competitive or uncompetitive relative to the specific list in front of you; the same score can be a strength at one school and a liability at another.
• Kollegio.ai closes the gap by matching your score against the actual admitted-student data at schools that fit you, so you're building a list around real targets instead of chasing a number in the abstract.

Average SAT Scores by State — How Location and Participation Rates Skew the Numbers

Your state's average carries its own distortion, and it bends the numbers in a direction most test-takers never anticipate. The common assumption among high school students and college applicants is that there is a single, objective threshold that makes an SAT score "good," and that the national average is that threshold. But here is a state-level comparison that most students never think to question: the states with the highest average SAT scores are often the ones where almost nobody takes the test. That single fact makes the average SAT scores by state table one of the most misleading charts in college admissions, and leaning on it to gauge where you stand can send your planning in entirely the wrong direction.

Why High-Scoring States Are Often Low-Participation States in Disguise

The SAT participation rate by state tells a story that the score column alone never will. Across the market, states where the SAT is optional and self-funded tend to see only a small fraction of graduating seniors sit for the exam. When participation sits below 10 percent, the students who do show up are almost exclusively motivated, college-bound, and well-prepared. Their scores are high not because the state produces stronger students, but because struggling or undecided students simply opted out. The average is a portrait of a self-selected group, not a full class.

There is a second, less-discussed layer to this distortion: school type and socioeconomic composition. Students at low-income and vocational schools regularly post scores that fall far below state averages — scores in the range of 855 are not uncommon in those populations. When those students are underrepresented in a state's testing pool because they did not opt in, the published average climbs, not because outcomes improved, but because the most vulnerable test-takers were quietly excluded from the calculation.

The Mandatory-SAT States — What Michigan, Connecticut, and Delaware's Averages Actually Reveal

Michigan, Connecticut, and Delaware administer the SAT to virtually all public school juniors as part of the regular school day, pushing participation to near-universal levels. The result, as broader industry trends consistently show, is that their statewide averages sit closer to or below the national composite. That is not evidence of weaker students. It is evidence of an honest sample that includes students from every income level, school type, and level of college-readiness.

Key takeaway: A near-universal average is actually more statistically trustworthy than a cherry-picked one, even when the number looks less impressive on a chart.

Why Neither State nor National Averages Show If Your Score Is Competitive

Neither your state average nor the national average tells you whether a 1250 is competitive at the specific schools on your actual list. Industry research consistently shows that a student in a mandatory-testing state who scores above their state average might still be below the 25th percentile at their target school. State averages tell you how a population performed, a population shaped by participation rules, school funding, and socioeconomic mix, not how competitive your score is for the schools you actually want to attend.

To get a benchmark that does real work, pull the Common Data Set historical archive for each school you are seriously considering, find the 25th-percentile composite SAT score for enrolled students, and compare it directly to your own. That number, school-specific and grounded in real admitted-student data, is the only comparison worth building your strategy around.

This is exactly where students we work with at Kollegio tend to lose the most time: they benchmark against a distorted state average, conclude their score is competitive, and only discover the gap when they start researching individual schools. Kollegio's onboarding profile captures your score alongside your school type, coursework, and activities at the very start of the onboarding process, before any recommendations are generated, so that the College Finder and AI College Recommender can surface schools where your actual profile is genuinely competitive, not just schools where a misleading average made you feel safe. Getting that picture early, before the application list hardens, is how students avoid the costly mistake of building a list around a benchmark that was never real to begin with.

SAT Score Ranges and Percentiles — The First Benchmark That Actually Means Something

Score percentiles carry the same trap as state and national averages if you read them without asking what population they describe. A 75th percentile ranking feels like a green light; a 40th percentile ranking feels like a problem. Most students stop at that reaction, which means they skip the question that actually matters: compared to whom, and for what? One of the most consistent patterns among students navigating this process is that a score like a 1470 can feel simultaneously impressive and uncertain, leaving students genuinely unsure whether it clears the academic threshold for Stanford, UPenn, Duke, or UMich. That confusion is not a gap in effort; it is a gap in context, and closing it is exactly where personalized guidance matters most.

What a Percentile Actually Measures (And What It Doesn't)

A percentile rank tells you what share of all test-takers scored at or below your number. Score in the 74th percentile, and you outscored 74% of everyone who sat for the SAT that year. That is useful orientation data, according to College Board's score-understanding documentation, but it describes your position in a national population that includes students with no plans to apply to college at all.

The percentile is a map of the whole country, not a map of your competition. College Board publishes two percentile tables: one based on a nationally representative sample of all 11th and 12th graders, including non-test-takers, and one based only on actual SAT users.

The same score can sit at different percentile ranks depending on which table you read. That gap alone should signal that "your percentile" is not a single fixed truth. Non-native speakers encounter a particularly sharp version of this confusion: a strong SAT Reading and Writing score can land at a high percentile nationally yet feel completely disconnected from a student's real-world English fluency, a mismatch that makes the benchmark feel misleading rather than informative.

Understanding what the table actually measures, and for whom, is the first step toward reading your score clearly. The national average is depressed by mandatory state-testing populations who never intend to apply to college. Even among the college-bound subset who do apply, admitted-student medians at selective schools sit far higher — MIT's 25th percentile composite is 1510, hundreds of points above the national average — which means a student who celebrates "beating the national average" with an 1100 is optimizing for a finish line that exists nowhere on the actual admissions map of any moderately selective institution.

The Four Score Tiers, With Percentile Anchors

College Board's 2023–2024 percentile data for SAT users produces four clear tiers. Scores below 1010 fall under the 50th percentile and sit in the below-average range. Scores from roughly 1010 to 1060 represent the national average band, right near the 50th percentile, where ERW and Math each average near 500 to 510.

Scores around 1200 to 1350 land in the good range, spanning a broad band of upper percentiles nationally. Scores of 1500 and above cross into the excellent tier, representing a very small share of all test-takers. That top tier is where another real challenge surfaces: students aiming for 1500+, a threshold that sits in the very top percentiles of all test-takers, frequently describe the target as overwhelming, especially without any prior prep or a clear roadmap for where to begin. Knowing the number is not enough; what students need is a structured path from their current score to where their target schools actually set the bar.

Is 1200 a Good SAT Score?

It depends entirely on your list. A 1200 sits at roughly the 74th percentile nationally, which sounds strong in isolation. At an open-enrollment school it clears the typical admitted-student range entirely; at a selective state flagship it lands near the lower end of the middle 50%; at a highly selective institution it falls well below the 25th percentile. The question is not whether a 1200 is good; it is whether a 1200 is good for the specific schools on your list, and only school-level Common Data Set figures can answer that.

This is precisely where score interpretation and college fit must be solved together, not in sequence. Kollegio's College Finder and personalized college recommendations are built to do exactly that: at the very start of the Kollegio onboarding process, before recommendations are generated, your onboarding profile captures your academic profile, including your SAT score, so that every college match it surfaces reflects your actual competitive position, not a generic national average. Beyond fit, the platform's Scholarship Finder and personalized financial aid tools connect that same profile to aid opportunities, so a student who understands their score in context can also ensure they don't miss financial aid deadlines or eligibility windows that a percentile number alone would never reveal. Score clarity and school-list strategy are not two separate conversations; handled together, they are the foundation of an application that is built around where you can genuinely compete.

Average SAT Scores at Top Colleges — The Benchmark That Determines If Your Score Is Actually Competitive

A 1400 can be a competitive score at one school and a liability at another, which means national averages are nearly useless for making real admissions decisions. The benchmark that actually matters is the middle 50% range published in each school's Common Data Set, because it tells you exactly where your score lands relative to the students who got in. The sub-sections below break down how to read that range, where common misconceptions distort students' sense of their own competitiveness, and how the numbers shift across selectivity tiers.

Why the Middle 50% Range Is the Only College-Level Benchmark That Matters

Schools publish their admitted-student SAT data in something called the Common Data Set, and the number to focus on is the middle 50% range: the scores held by the 25th through 75th percentile of enrolled students. According to industry research, that range sits at 1510–1580 for MIT, with a 25th percentile Math score of 790. That single data point tells you more about what it takes to get into MIT than any national average ever could. One of the most common distortions beginners face is a skewed sense of where their score actually lands. Students regularly encounter a lopsided sample of scores, heavy on 1500s and 1600s, that makes a score of 1350 feel disqualifying. It isn't. The national score distribution is far wider than that slice suggests, and the middle 50% range from a school's own Common Data Set is the only honest reference point.

Key takeaway: The middle 50% is not a hard cutoff, but it is a competitive signal. Score below the 25th percentile and you are swimming against the current, but that current looks very different depending on which school you are talking about.

SAT Score Ranges Across Selectivity Tiers

Students from lower-income backgrounds struggle to achieve competitive SAT scores relative to top college benchmarks because they lack access to the tutors and prep courses that wealthier peers use to hit those high score thresholds.

1510–1580 MIT's middle 50% admitted SAT range

The same raw score occupies radically different positions depending on where you apply. A 1300 puts you well below MIT's 25th percentile, solidly within range at many strong state flagships, and potentially at or above the merit-scholarship trigger threshold at a broad-access regional school. That is three entirely different strategic realities produced by one number.

Selectivity Tier	Example Schools	Middle SAT Range
Highly Selective	MIT, Harvard	1510–1580 (MIT)
Selective	UCLA, UNC Chapel Hill	see school CDS for current ranges
Moderately Selective	Large state flagships	varies; consult each school's CDS
Broad Access	Open-enrollment schools	varies; consult each school's CDS

The ranges in the table above are drawn from published Common Data Set figures; where no range is listed, consult that school's own CDS. The spread across tiers runs to hundreds of points, which is exactly why the national average tells you almost nothing useful. Another real pressure point: students from lower-income households often enter this process at a structural disadvantage.

Wealthier peers have had access to tutors and intensive prep courses that meaningfully move scores toward those upper thresholds. That gap is real, and it makes matching your score to the right tier of schools, rather than chasing a ceiling benchmark, even more important. A well-built college list, anchored to your actual profile and your family's financial situation, is more valuable than a higher score at the wrong school.

This is exactly what Kollegio's College Finder and AI College Recommender are designed to surface. At the very start of the Kollegio onboarding process, before any recommendations are generated, your onboarding profile captures your academic record, test scores, activities, and financial context together. That means the schools that come back aren't just sorted by selectivity; they reflect a realistic, balanced list matched to where your score is genuinely competitive, where financial aid is attainable, and where your full profile carries weight.

How to Use the Fit Zone

Scoring inside a school's middle range means you are in the competitive zone. Here is how each position translates into strategic reality:

• Scoring above the 75th percentile strengthens your application beyond the academic threshold.
• Scoring within the middle 50% places you in the competitive zone for that school.
• Scoring below the 25th percentile does not disqualify you automatically, but your score becomes a headwind rather than a tailwind, and other parts of your application need to carry more weight.
• Students with strong GPAs and focused extracurriculars frequently wonder whether their SAT score is even moving the needle, and the honest answer is: it depends entirely on the school.
• At a highly selective institution like MIT, where the Common Data Set shows a 25th percentile composite of 1510, a score of 1380 carries significant weight as a headwind.
• At a moderately selective flagship, that same 1380 may fall squarely within the middle of the range, making it essentially a non-issue.
• The score doesn't change; the context does.
• The practical move: pull the Common Data Set for every school on your list, find the 25th percentile composite, and compare it to your current score.
• That gap, or surplus, is your actual benchmark, not a number you found on a summary website.
• Kollegio's Scholarship Finder and financial aid tools layer on top of this picture, identifying where your score may unlock merit aid thresholds, so the list you build is optimized for both admissions fit and financial outcome simultaneously.

Test-Optional Strategy and the Hidden Cost of Submitting Below the 25th Percentile

Test-optional policies give students a choice, but that choice carries real consequences. Submitting a score below a school's 25th percentile can actively signal that your academic profile is weaker than the admitted pool, potentially drawing attention to the gap rather than away from it. If you are test-optional and your score falls below that threshold, the stronger strategic move is usually to omit it and let your GPA, course rigor, and extracurricular record carry the academic narrative instead.

It is also worth noting that recent SAT administrations have produced meaningful score drops for some students, shifts of significant magnitude that can push a previously competitive score below a school's 25th percentile. If your most recent score dropped relative to an earlier attempt, that context matters when deciding what to submit and where. The decision is not just about the number in isolation; it is about where that number sits relative to each school's published data.

When you are weighing whether to submit, Kollegio's Activity Feedback and AI Essay Planner become the instruments that fill the space a withheld score leaves open, giving admissions readers a clear, substantive academic and personal narrative that doesn't depend on a test result to carry credibility. The goal is a balanced application, not a perfect one, built around the real profile you have, and that is precisely the outcome a well-structured college list from Kollegio is designed to support.

Related Reading

• Boston University SAT Scores
• UPenn SAT Scores
• UF SAT Scores
• UCLA SAT Scores
• Clemson SAT Scores
• Northwestern SAT Scores
• Villanova SAT Scores
• Georgetown SAT Scores
• Vanderbilt SAT Scores
• Boston College SAT Scores
• Purdue SAT Scores
• Johns Hopkins SAT Scores
• Brown SAT Scores

How to Improve Your SAT Score Once You Know Where You Actually Stand

Eight weeks of Khan Academy and four full practice tests can still leave a student exactly where they started, if they never defined what "good enough" actually means for their specific list. The problem is not effort; it is direction. The core synthesis here is this: retake decisions should be reverse-engineered from school-specific middle-50% data, not from vague aspirations to "improve." A student 80 points below a target school's 25th-percentile score has a clear, calculable gap worth closing, while a student already inside the middle band faces an entirely different calculus, one where additional points buy far less. A student who needs 80 points to clear a target school's 25th-percentile threshold needs a fundamentally different plan than one who needs 200 points, and treating both situations the same way is what turns prep into a grind with no finish line.

Start With the Gap Number, Not the Study Plan

The only number that matters is the distance between your current score and the 25th-percentile score of your target schools. That is your gap. One of the most common situations students bring to Kollegio is a profile that looks lopsided on the surface, say, a 1310 composite with a Math score of 780 and a Reading & Writing score of 530, where the composite gap to a 1500 target feels enormous until you break it down by section.

That single diagnostic reframe changes everything: the student does not have a 190-point problem; they have a focused Reading & Writing problem, and that is a solvable, bounded challenge.

Key takeaway: Meaningful score gains are achievable across retake cycles when prep is directed at the right targets. An 80-point section gap is genuinely closeable in one focused cycle, but a 200-point gap is a different conversation entirely.

To put that into practice:

• Pull the middle-50% score ranges for every school on your list.
• Write down the 25th-percentile composite for each one.
• Use that column of numbers as your actual study target.

Kollegio's College Finder and AI College Recommender surface exactly this school-by-school data as part of building your student profile, so the gap number is never a guess.

The Free Prep Stack That Actually Closes a Defined Gap

Once you know your gap, the prep itself does not need to cost anything. The key word is personalized: Khan Academy pulls from your actual score report to surface the specific sub-skills costing you the most points. A student who scores 1180 and targets schools with a 1300 threshold, for example, might find that the overwhelming majority of lost points sit in Math grid-ins, not Reading & Writing.

That diagnostic changes everything about where the next ten weeks go. What makes this hard in practice is that students who are stuck, especially on Reading & Writing, frequently cannot see why they are stuck. They retake, they study, and the score barely moves, which breeds a particular kind of frustration: working hard without a finish line.

The students Kollegio works with who experience this plateau almost always share one trait: they have been practicing the wrong sub-skills, because no one helped them read their own score report correctly. Kollegio's College Finder and AI Essay Planner exist in part to redirect that energy, because once the test prep ceiling becomes clear, the next highest-leverage move is often the application itself. Kollegio's essay review capability means a student can shift from diminishing-returns score chasing to strengthening the written components of their application without losing momentum.

How Superscore Policies Change Whether You Retake One Section or Both

A strong majority of four-year colleges now superscore the SAT, meaning they take your best section scores across multiple sittings and combine them into a new composite. If your Math score is already inside your target schools' middle 50% but your Reading and Writing score is dragging the composite below the 25th percentile, retaking the full test may be inefficient. A targeted single-section focus, leaning into the weaker section while maintaining the stronger one, can close a composite gap more quickly and with less disruption to your overall application timeline.

This is exactly the kind of decision Kollegio helps clarify during the planning phase. When a student's profile is built at the start of the Kollegio onboarding process, before recommendations are even generated, the platform maps section-level scores against the middle-50% ranges of schools on the student's list. That mapping makes the superscore math visible: is a retake worth it, which section, and how does the timeline interact with application deadlines?

Those answers live in the data, not in a vague instinct to "keep improving."

Your SAT Score and Your College List — How to Stop Chasing a Number and Start Finding Your Fit

Every school on your list has a different lock, and your SAT score is the key you are carrying into that conversation. Knowing the key exists tells you nothing useful on its own. What matters is whether it fits the specific doors in front of you.

Your Score vs. Admitted Students at Your Target Schools

The middle-50% range of admitted students at your target schools is the only benchmark worth tracking. A score of 1250 sits comfortably above the 25th percentile at many strong state universities while falling below it at highly selective schools. The national average cannot tell you which side of that line you're on. Only school-specific Common Data Set figures can. A first-generation student deciding between UNC, Purdue, and Clemson needs three separate comparisons, not one national number.

This is worth sitting with honestly: a high score does not guarantee admission, and it does not answer the question of fit. International students carrying a 1560 still receive rejections from elite and highly selective colleges with regularity, not because their score is wrong, but because score alone is never the full picture. At the most selective schools, a near-perfect SAT is table stakes, not a differentiator. Understanding which schools treat your score as a genuine advantage, versus which ones treat it as merely sufficient, is the real work of building a college list.

How to Categorize Your List Using Real School Score Ranges, Not Gut Feel

Pull the 25th and 75th percentile SAT scores from each school's Common Data Set. The framework maps as follows:

Your Score vs. School Range	Classification	What It Means
Above the 75th percentile	Safety	Likely clears the admitted-student range
Within the 25th–75th percentile range	Target	You are in the competitive zone
Below the 25th percentile	Reach	Score is a headwind; other application components carry more weight

This framework is straightforward in theory. In practice, most students spend hours across multiple tabs, still missing the full picture because a score only means something alongside GPA, course rigor, and extracurriculars. Kollegio addresses exactly this complexity through its AI College Recommender and its onboarding profile.

At the very start of the Kollegio onboarding process, before any recommendations are generated, students build a profile that captures the full picture: academics, activities, and goals together. From that complete profile, Kollegio's AI College Recommender surfaces schools where your specific combination of credentials signals genuine fit, not just a score that clears a threshold. The Activity Feedback feature lets students present the extracurricular depth that selective schools weigh alongside test scores, so the comparison being made is profile-to-school, not score-to-score.

The Counselor Gap — How to Cross-Reference Your Full Profile Against School-Specific Data Yourself

According to the American School Counselor Association (ASCA), the national student-to-counselor ratio still far exceeds the recommended 250:1, and recent data confirms the gap persists even as modest progress is made. An overworked counselor serving hundreds of students cannot realistically cross-reference your SAT score against admitted-student ranges at 12 target schools, let alone map your GPA, course rigor, activities, and financial situation onto each one simultaneously. Private counselors who do that work often charge thousands of dollars for full-service packages.

The students most likely to rely on a national average as their only benchmark are, by no coincidence, the same students who have the least access to individualized guidance, and the same students for whom financial barriers have already limited access to paid SAT prep programs in the first place. That is a structural gap, not a personal failing, and it is worth naming honestly when building your own research process.

Kollegio's Scholarship Finder and financial aid tools exist in direct response to this reality. Low-income students and international applicants without access to expensive counseling or test prep do not need a workaround; they need a tool that brings the same school-specific, profile-matched analysis that a private counselor would provide. Kollegio's personalized college recommendations are generated from your actual student profile, and its Scholarship Finder surfaces financial aid options matched to that same profile, so the guidance is both academically and financially grounded from the start.

Next steps

If your score feels ambiguous because you have no clear target to measure it against, the path forward starts with treating the middle-50% range at each specific school as your real benchmark, not the national composite. Start with our AI college counselor.

The national average is depressed by mandatory state-testing populations who never intended to apply to college, meaning a student who clears it with a 1100 is optimizing for a finish line that exists nowhere on any selective school's admissions map. At the same time, the structural counselor shortage means most students have no practical way to cross-reference their score against admitted-student ranges at every school on their list, so the national average becomes a proxy by default, not because it works. Those two realities together make the case for a tool that does the school-specific mapping automatically, from your actual profile outward.

Start with Kollegio's AI college counselor to match your score against the middle-50% ranges of your specific target schools. From there, the platform surfaces a personalized college list, scholarship matches, and financial aid options tied to where your profile is genuinely competitive.

Frequently Asked Questions

What counts as an above-average or below-average SAT score?

Based on College Board's most recent data, the national composite average is approximately 1024, with section averages near 500–510 for both Evidence-Based Reading and Writing and Math. Scores below 1010 fall under the 50th percentile and are considered below average, while scores above 1060 begin to climb above the national average band, though beating that average alone is not a meaningful signal of competitiveness at most four-year colleges.

Why do states like Mississippi or Wyoming sometimes post higher average SAT scores than states like Michigan or Connecticut?

States with high average SAT scores are typically low-participation states, where only a small fraction of seniors, almost exclusively motivated, college-bound, and well-prepared students, choose to take the test, which inflates the average. Michigan, Connecticut, and Delaware require all public school juniors to take the SAT, producing near-universal participation and a more honest, representative sample that naturally sits closer to or below the national composite.

Is a 1200 a good SAT score?

It depends entirely on where you are applying. A 1200 sits at roughly the 74th percentile nationally, which clears the typical range at open-enrollment schools, lands near the lower end of the middle 50% at selective state flagships, and falls well below the 25th percentile at highly selective institutions like MIT, whose middle 50% range is 1510–1580.

How do I figure out if my SAT score is actually competitive for a specific college?

Pull the Common Data Set historical archive for each school you are seriously considering and find the 25th-percentile composite SAT score for enrolled students; that figure is the only school-specific comparison worth building your strategy around. Scoring below a school's 25th percentile means you are swimming against the current, while scoring within or above the middle 50% range signals genuine competitiveness.

How should I set a realistic target SAT score?

Start by identifying the 25th-to-75th percentile middle 50% SAT range published in the Common Data Set for each school on your list, then use the score that appears at or above the 25th percentile of your most selective target school as your floor. Because the same raw score, like a 1300, can put you well below the 25th percentile at MIT, solidly within range at a strong state flagship, and potentially at a merit-scholarship threshold at a broad-access school, your target must be anchored to your actual list rather than to any national or state average.