SAT Scores Percentiles Explained: The 2026 Student Guide

Your raw SAT score means nothing without its percentile context. Here is how to read the right percentile, avoid the number that flatters you, and build a college list that reflects where you actually stand.

Most high school students applying to college think: "If my SAT score feels high compared to the national average, I'm in good shape for most schools on my list." That instinct is understandable, but it skips the one step that actually matters in admissions. A raw composite score is essentially meaningless without its percentile context.

That context is what separates a confident college list from one built on a false sense of where you stand. Tools like Kollegio's college match results exist precisely because that translation, from score to school-specific fit, is where most students lose time and make costly assumptions. Kollegio's match tool is built to keep that translation from score to school-specific fit from becoming guesswork, so a list is balanced before applications start.

See our AI college counselor for how this works in practice. A grade measures how much of a specific course you mastered. Your SAT composite score does something different: it places you on a scale relative to every other student who sat for the same test. According to the College Board, a composite score of 1010 sits right at the 50th percentile among actual SAT users, meaning half of all test-takers scored at or above that level.

The number itself carries no meaning until you know where it lands in that distribution. Your percentile rank tells you the share of test-takers you outscored, not how many questions you answered correctly. Score in the 87th percentile and you outperformed 87 out of every 100 students who took the exam.

With roughly 1.7 million students sitting for the SAT in a recent testing year, the gap between the 80th and 90th percentile represents well over a hundred thousand real applicants competing for the same seats. Admissions offices publish middle-50% score ranges, the band between the 25th and 75th percentile of their enrolled class, because raw points mean nothing without a reference group. A 1300 can represent a strong applicant at one school and an underprepared one at another.

Students are routinely unsure whether their raw SAT score (e.g., 1470) is "good enough" — confusion about what score thresholds actually mean in a competitive applicant pool, rooted in a missing sense of percentile context.

Key takeaways

• Your SAT percentile is school-specific, not universal: a 1350 that clears the 75th percentile nationally can sit below the 25th-percentile floor at a selective school on your list.
• Every official score report prints two percentile numbers; most students read the larger one, feel reassured, and miss the section-level gap that quietly disqualifies them.
• The middle 50% range published by each school is the only benchmark that matters for list-building; national percentile rankings are a separate conversation.
• A composite score can look encouraging while a single weak section holds you below a specific school's threshold; targeted prep starts by identifying that section, not chasing a higher composite.
• Confusing national percentile standing with school-specific competitiveness is how students end up with reach-heavy lists and thin safety options.
• The real problem isn't missing data; it's that cross-referencing your percentile against every school's enrolled-class middle 50% across a full list is too slow to do manually.
• Kollegio.ai closes that gap by running your SAT percentile against each school's actual admissions data in one place, so your college list reflects where you genuinely stand, not where you hope you do.

The Two Types of SAT Percentiles — and the One Most Students Read Wrong

The common assumption among high school students is: "If my SAT score feels high compared to the national average, I'm in good shape for most schools on my list." Two percentile numbers are printed on every official SAT score report, and most students notice the larger one, feel reassured, and move on. That single habit quietly distorts how competitive they believe their score is before they have sent a single application.

Nationally Representative Sample Percentile — The Number That Includes Students Who Never Touched the SAT

The Nationally Representative Sample percentile is calculated against all U.S. 11th and 12th graders, including students who never sat for the SAT. Because that broader population skews lower-scoring than students who actively prepare and register for the test, your rank inside it will always look flattering. This figure is designed to show how a score compares to the full national student population, not to the applicant pool a college actually sees, a distinction the College Board's SAT score-understanding guide makes explicit.

User Percentile — The Competitive Benchmark Admissions Offices Actually Mirror

The SAT User percentile is calculated only against students who actually took the SAT, a self-selected group that is, on average, more academically prepared and college-focused. The College Board's official score resources confirm that the User percentile mirrors the competitive pool admissions offices evaluate, making it the only number that tells you something genuinely useful about your standing among the students you will compete against.

Same Score, Two Very Different Percentile Numbers

The gap between the two figures is not trivial. A composite score of 1200 sits at roughly the 74th Nationally Representative percentile but only the 57th User percentile, a 17-point spread that can make a borderline school look meaningfully safer than it is. That difference is not a rounding error; it is the mathematical result of including millions of non-test-takers in one denominator and excluding them from the other. The College Board's score interpretation framework explains exactly how each denominator is constructed, and reading it alongside your score report is the only way to understand what your number truly means in context.

Why Misreading the Two Can Accidentally Build a Reach-Heavy College List

17-point Percentile gap from one misread score

A student who believes they are in the 74th percentile may classify a school whose admitted middle 50% runs from the 65th to the 80th User percentile as a solid target. At their actual 57th User percentile, that same school is a reach. Multiply that miscalculation across eight or ten schools and an entire list tilts toward reaches without the student ever realizing it.

There is a compounding problem that makes this worse: students with lower test scores routinely self-select out of test-mandatory schools, treating the published 25th-percentile SAT figure as a hard cutoff rather than a statistical description of a range. The result is that a school's admitted pool may be far more attainable than it appears, yet qualified applicants never apply, a psychological barrier built entirely on a misread number. This is one of the most costly mistakes students make during list-building, and it happens before the first application is opened.

This is precisely the gap Kollegio's onboarding profile and College Finder are designed to close. At the very start of the Kollegio onboarding process, before recommendations are generated, students enter their scores and academic profile so the platform can surface best-fit schools based on User percentile positioning, not on the inflated Nationally Representative figure. Instead of a student manually cross-referencing the College Board's published data against each school's Common Data Set, Kollegio's College Finder streamlines how institutional information is surfaced to best-fit students, reaching them while they are actively searching and helping them build a balanced list, targets, reaches, and likelies, grounded in the competitive benchmark that actually matters.

SAT Composite and Section Score Percentile Charts for 2026

Flip your score report to the section breakdown before you celebrate the composite. That single habit separates students who understand their position from those who spend months applying to the wrong schools. The composite percentile printed at the top of your results is a blended number, and blended numbers hide problems the way a class average hides the student who failed and the one who aced it.

One of the most common points of confusion students bring to this process is a simple one: they don't have a reliable, accessible reference for what their score actually means in the current competitive pool. A student scoring 1480 and eyeing Northwestern, whose 25th-percentile cutoff sits at 1500, faces a genuinely consequential question: does submitting that score help or hurt the application? National percentile charts alone can't answer it.

That's exactly the kind of decision-funnel problem that Kollegio's onboarding profile and College Finder are built to resolve early, before a student has spent months crafting essays for schools that are a poor statistical fit.

2026 SAT Composite Score Percentile Chart

College Board publishes two distinct percentile columns for every composite score, and the gap between them is not cosmetic. Across the market, a composite of 1200 sits at roughly the 74th percentile on the Nationally Representative scale but closer to the 57th on the User percentile scale. That 17-point swing exists because the Nationally Representative figure counts all U.S. 11th and 12th graders, including students who never sat for the SAT, while the User percentile counts only actual test-takers, the competitive pool colleges actually reference.

Composite Score	User Percentile (approx.)	Nationally Representative Percentile (approx.)
1600	99+	99+
1550	99	99+
1500	96	99
1450	93	97
1400	88	95
1350	82	92
1300	75	88
1200	57	74
1100	38	58
1029	32 (national average score)	51
1000	28	47
900	15	32

Source: College Board 2024–2025 SAT percentile tables. Figures are approximate and reflect published data; 2026 figures are expected to track closely until College Board issues an updated release.

The honest limitation here: these are national benchmarks, not school-level filters. A 1500 at the 96th User percentile still falls below MIT's 25th-percentile cutoff of 1510, which means national rank alone cannot tell you whether you are competitive at a specific school. This is exactly where students get hurt: they see a high national percentile, feel confident, and skip the school-by-school reality check.

Kollegio's College Finder is designed to surface that gap at the very start of the onboarding process, before recommendations are generated, so the list you build reflects where your score is genuinely competitive rather than where it merely looks impressive on a national chart. Reaching students at that early decision point, before applications are drafted and directions are locked in, is how Kollegio helps improve the quality, and ultimately the yield, of every application in a student's list.

Score Benchmark Thresholds by Percentile Band

The benchmark thresholds on the User percentile scale fall at these approximate scores: 1580 for the top 1%, 1510 for the top 5%, 1460 for the top 10%, 1310 for the top 25%, and 1010 for the top 50% (median). Industry data consistently confirms these figures, and the College Board's own 2025 data puts the national average composite at 1029. Knowing which band you fall into is useful context, but it becomes actionable only when it is mapped against the specific 25th-to-75th percentile ranges of the schools on your list. That school-by-school mapping, combined with a full Kollegio profile that accounts for your activities, essays, and financial aid picture, is what turns a percentile number into a strategic college list.

What Is a Good SAT Score? Why the Answer Depends on Your College List

A score of 1350 sits at roughly the 82nd percentile, meaning you outperformed the vast majority of students who sat for the SAT. That sounds like a strong position. The problem is that national percentiles and school-specific competitiveness are two entirely different conversations, and confusing them is one of the most common, and most costly, mistakes students make when building a college list.

One of the clearest patterns we see among students navigating admissions for the first time is this: a student earns a 1470, feels genuinely good about it, and then freezes when it comes to building a college list, because there is no universal benchmark that tells them whether 1470 is competitive at the specific schools they care about. That uncertainty is not a character flaw. It is a structural gap in how SAT scores are commonly explained, and it leads students to either undersell themselves on a list full of safety schools or overreach with a list that ignores the data entirely.

Why "Good" Is a Moving Target Tied to Each School's Middle-50% Band

Every college publishes a Common Data Set each year. Inside that document sits one of the most useful numbers in the entire admissions process: the school's middle-50% SAT band, the range between the 25th and 75th percentile of enrolled students. A score above the 75th percentile signals academic strength relative to that class.

A score between the two percentiles places you in the typical admitted range. A score below the 25th percentile creates an academic flag that other parts of your application must work hard to overcome. The national average has no role in that calculation whatsoever.

Kollegio's College Match Results are built around band-relative positioning rather than raw national percentiles. When a student completes their profile at the very start of the Kollegio onboarding process, before any recommendations are generated, Kollegio captures their SAT score alongside GPA, intended major, geographic preferences, and other context. The College Finder then surfaces schools where that specific score lands above the 25th percentile, between the percentiles, or below it, so students see their real position at each institution rather than a generic "good score" label.

Highly Selective Schools (Top-20): Where the Floor Starts Around the 90th Percentile

At MIT, the 2024–25 Common Data Set places the middle-50% SAT band at 1510–1580. Princeton's published band runs approximately 1500–1570, per Princeton's own Common Data Set filing. That means a 1490, a score most students would celebrate, falls below the 25th percentile at both schools.

It is not a reach by feel; it is a reach by data. A student who sees a 1490 and thinks "I'm above the national average by a wide margin" is not wrong about the national picture. They are simply looking at the wrong picture entirely.

And without a tool that maps their score to each school's actual band, that distinction is easy to miss until after applications are submitted.

Moderately Selective Schools (State Flagships): Competitive Scores in the 1150–1350 Range

State flagship universities occupy a meaningfully different tier. Based on our review of Common Data Set filings, schools like the University of Michigan and UCLA have middle-50% bands roughly spanning 1360–1530 and 1300–1530 respectively, with the lower end of that range accessible to strong applicants in the 1200s who bring other competitive elements. A 1350 that falls short at a highly selective school can comfortably clear the 25th percentile at a broad flagship, shifting its signal from "long shot" to "within range."

This is where building a balanced list becomes both an art and a data exercise. Kollegio's College Finder and Plan Applications tools help students map out exactly this kind of tiered list, pairing schools where their score is above the 75th percentile with schools where they sit comfortably within the band, and schools where they are reaching but not out of the picture. The goal is a list grounded in real admissions data, not optimism or excessive caution.

What Your Score Position in a School's Percentile Band Signals

Where your score lands relative to a school's band tells an admissions reader something specific. Above the 75th percentile signals that your academic profile is stronger than most enrolled students; it can offset a thinner extracurricular record or add resilience to an application in other ways. Between the 25th and 75th percentile means your score is squarely in the range of students that school admits. You are not fighting the numbers, but you are also not coasting on them.

The rest of your application, essays, activities, recommendations, carries meaningful weight in that zone. Kollegio pairs score positioning with essay and application support. The AI Essay Planner and Review Essays feature provide direct feedback on college application essays to improve their quality, because a student landing in the middle of a school's band needs their personal statement to do real work.

The Recommendation Letter Co-pilot helps students think through how to approach that part of their file, and Activity Feedback gives them a structured way to present extracurriculars compellingly, all of it calibrated to the specific schools on their list. Knowing where your SAT score stands is the starting point. Building an application that makes the most of that position is the work that follows.

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How to Use Your SAT Percentile to Build a Balanced College List — Not a Reach-Heavy One

Most students build their college lists around school names and gut feelings, then retrofit their SAT score as an afterthought. What actually produces a list worth applying to is the reverse: starting with where your percentile lands relative to each school's middle 50% range, then sorting every candidate into a tier based on that data. The framework and the tools to apply it are both simpler than they sound.

The Three-Tier List Framework — Where Your Percentile Falls Relative to Each School's Middle 50%

The most useful framework in college list-building is simple: every school on your list should fall into one of three tiers based on where your SAT lands relative to that school's middle 50% range. If your score sits above the 75th percentile for enrolled freshmen, that school is a likely. If it falls within the band, it's a target.

If it falls below the 25th percentile, it's a reach, regardless of how the school's name sounds to you or your parents. A student with a 1280, for example, clears the 75th percentile at many regional universities, making those genuine safeties. That same 1280 falls below the 25th percentile at schools like UCLA or Georgetown, making them reaches by data, not just by reputation.

One pattern that catches students off guard: even a 1560, a score that clears the 75th percentile at the overwhelming majority of four-year colleges, still results in rejection at the most selective institutions. That reality matters enormously when building a list, because it means a high percentile position is a necessary input, not a sufficient guarantee. A balanced list accounts for that gap explicitly, which is exactly why the three-tier structure exists: it forces you to see probability clearly rather than letting a strong score lull you into reach-heavy overconfidence.

How to Pull a School's Middle-50% SAT Range from the Common Data Set Tonight

Every accredited college publishes a Common Data Set (CDS) each year. Section C9 of that document lists the 25th and 75th percentile SAT scores for enrolled first-year students. To find it, search the school's name plus "Common Data Set 2024-25" and look for a PDF from the institution's institutional research office.

MIT's 2024–25 CDS, published by MIT Institutional Research, is one clean example of exactly what this looks like in practice. If you want to search across multiple schools at once without hunting down individual PDFs, GradGPT's Common Data Set index aggregates CDS files in one place. One important detail most students miss: these bands reflect enrolled students, not just admitted ones.

Because of self-selection and yield decisions, the enrolled pool is often more competitive than the admitted pool, a nuance MIT Institutional Research makes explicit in the methodology notes of Section C of its CDS. That means the CDS benchmark is stricter than it first appears, and a school you mentally filed as a target may quietly be a reach once you check the actual numbers.

Reach, Target, Likely — Defined by Percentile Position, Not Prestige or Gut Feel

Prestige is not a tier. Gut feel is not a tier. Your score's position relative to the school's CDS band is the only definition that matters for admissions probability.

Students who rely on reputation to build their lists consistently overload the reach column without realizing it. The practical fix is mechanical: list every school, pull each CDS band, and place your score on the spectrum. If fewer than three schools sit in the likely tier, your list needs rebalancing before you write a single essay.

Building a genuinely balanced list also means layering in factors beyond the SAT band, your interests, your academic profile, and your family's financial situation all shape which schools are truly realistic targets versus statistical coincidences. This is where relying on percentile math alone breaks down in practice. Kollegio's AI College Recommender is designed specifically for this moment: at the very start of the Kollegio onboarding process, before recommendations are generated, students complete a profile that captures academic stats alongside interests and financial context, so the schools surfaced are calibrated to the full picture, not just where a score lands on a band.

The Scholarship Finder and Kollegio's financial aid tools layer in funding fit so that a school classified as a "likely" by test score isn't quietly unaffordable in practice.

A Quick Percentile-to-List Audit You Can Run Before Your Next Application Deadline

Pull every school currently on your list. For each one, retrieve Section C9 of the current Common Data Set, either directly from the school's institutional research office or via a CDS index, and record the 25th and 75th percentile SAT figures. Place your score against each band and label the school: likely, target, or reach.

Count the tiers. A functional list holds schools in all three categories, with enough likelies to constitute a genuine safety net. If that audit reveals a reach-heavy list, the rebalancing work is not just about adding names; it's about finding schools that fit academically, match your goals, and make sense financially.

Kollegio's Plan Applications feature is built to support exactly that kind of structured review, helping students move from a raw list to a sequenced, balanced application plan before deadlines compress decision-making.

How to Improve Your SAT Score When Your Percentile Shows a Gap

Targeted prep strategy begins with a question most students never quite ask: not "how do I raise my composite?" but "which section is keeping me below this specific school's 25th-percentile floor?" The distinction matters because a composite score can look encouraging while a single weak section quietly holds it below the threshold that counts.

The core insight this guide advances is that effective SAT improvement is not about raising a composite score in the abstract; it is about closing a specific gap relative to a specific school's 25th-percentile threshold, and the section-level architecture of the score determines how to get there. Because CDS bands expose exactly which composite range a student must enter, and because College Board publishes section-level percentiles separately, a student can identify which single section is keeping them below a target school's floor and direct all prep to that section, converting a vague "study more" mandate into a precise, school-anchored intervention with a measurable endpoint.

Diagnose Before You Drill — Use Section-Score Percentiles to Find Your Actual Drag

Section-level percentiles are where honest prep begins. College Board publishes Math and Evidence-Based Reading and Writing (EBRW) percentiles separately, and the gap between them tells you exactly where your composite is bleeding points. One of the most common patterns students bring to Kollegio is a split like Math 780 / Reading & Writing 530, a 250-point section gap that makes the composite nearly meaningless as a signal of readiness.

The stronger section is masking a severe drag; virtually all prep energy belongs on Reading & Writing until that floor rises. The inverse pattern is just as real: a student stuck around 700 in Math often cannot identify what specific skill cluster is capping them. They feel like they are working hard but the percentile gap refuses to close. That diagnostic fog is the first thing Kollegio's onboarding profile and AI Essay Planner surface when a student enters the platform, because understanding where the score is actually bleeding is a prerequisite for any other college-application work to be meaningful.

A 30-point gain in the weaker section from a low baseline moves the composite percentile far more than chasing another 30 points from an already-strong section near its ceiling. The section imbalance is the drag. Fix the drag first.

Why Gains at the 25th-Percentile Floor Outweigh Gains at the 75th Ceiling

Not all score gains are equal in admissions terms. According to industry research, moving a score from below a school's 25th-percentile threshold into the accepted middle-50% band has a disproportionately large impact on admissions outcomes compared to adding the same points when a score already clears the 75th. The logic is structural: below the floor, you are screened out before context matters.

Above the ceiling, you are already competitive and additional points produce diminishing returns. Students who have taken the SAT multiple times often arrive at Kollegio asking whether another attempt, chasing 10 or 20 marginal points, is worth the effort. The answer depends entirely on where those points land relative to a specific school's floor, not on the points themselves in the abstract.

That is precisely the kind of school-anchored judgment Kollegio's College Finder makes concrete: once your target schools are identified, the platform can map your current section scores against each school's published range so you can see immediately whether you are below a floor that warrants another attempt or already inside a band where essay quality and activities will move the needle more than any retake. Target the floor, not the ceiling. That single reframe converts vague "study more" pressure into a measurable, school-specific endpoint, and it is the foundation on which every other element of a Kollegio application plan is built.

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Stop Piecing This Together Alone — Get Your Personalized SAT Percentile Analysis

The score band you need and the schools you are targeting have to be read together, not in separate spreadsheets, and that joint picture is what this section builds out in full.

The gap students face is not an information gap; it is a synthesis gap: the ability to cross-reference a student's User percentile against each school's enrolled-class middle-50% band across an entire college list simultaneously. Every data point needed to do this is publicly available in Common Data Set filings and College Board percentile tables, but assembling it coherently across 8 to 12 schools is precisely the labor private counselors charge upward of $10,000 to perform, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling's annual survey of independent counseling fees.

Why Doing This Manually for 10 Schools Is the Step Almost Every Student Skips

Common App data shows students now apply to an average of 8 to 12 schools per cycle. Running a proper percentile-to-band comparison for each school means pulling the CDS file, finding the middle-50% SAT range, locating your User percentile (not the inflated Nationally Representative figure), and cross-referencing them school by school. Most students do this for one or two dream schools, then guess for the rest. The hidden cost is a reach-heavy list built on incomplete data, not strategy, which quietly raises the odds of a difficult spring.

Why Every Student, Regardless of Budget, Can Now Run a Counselor-Grade Percentile Fit Analysis

Private counseling is disproportionately accessed by higher-income students. Ivy Coach has noted that official surveys likely undercount how many students use private college consultants, meaning the true access gap is wider than reported figures suggest, and Time has documented how private counselors function as gatekeepers to selective admissions, a role that by definition advantages students whose families can pay for the door to be opened. Kollegio is built to close that gap.

At the very start of the onboarding process, before any recommendations are generated, Kollegio builds a full student profile. That profile feeds the AI College Recommender, which maps a student's academic standing against real enrolled-class data across an entire list, not just the one or two schools a student happened to research on their own. The output is the same school-by-school percentile fit picture a private counselor assembles manually, delivered without the four-figure fee.

The synthesis does not stop at scores. Because the college list and the application plan have to move together, Kollegio's Plan Applications feature lets students manage deadlines and strategy in the same place where fit was determined, so the reach, target, and likely designations are always visible alongside the actual work of applying. And because a competitive list is only as strong as the application that supports it, Kollegio's AI Essay Planner delivers detailed feedback on essays, and the Activity Feedback tools help students frame their extracurricular record with the same intentionality that counselor-guided students apply to every line of their application.

Personalized engagement and messaging keep the process moving so nothing critical gets dropped in the weeks between deadlines. The result: every student who builds their profile in Kollegio starts the college list conversation with the same synthesized, school-by-school picture that was previously the exclusive output of a $10,000 engagement, and they keep that picture in front of them through every step that follows.

Next steps

If your score looks strong on paper but you still can't tell whether it's competitive at the schools that actually matter to you, the path forward starts with comparing your User percentile against each school's enrolled-class middle-50% band, not the national average.

The Nationally Representative percentile on your score report inflates your standing by including students who never took the SAT, which means a student reading the wrong column can overestimate their position by 15 percentile points or more before they look at a single school. At the same time, Common Data Set bands are built from enrolled students, not just admitted ones, making them a stricter benchmark than most students expect. Together, those two facts point to one action: map your actual User percentile against each school's CDS threshold, school by school, before your list is final.

Start with Kollegio's AI college counselor. It builds that cross-reference automatically across your full list so you can see, in one place, where your score clears the floor, sits in the middle of the band, or creates a flag you will need to address elsewhere in your application.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between the Nationally Representative percentile and the User percentile on my SAT score report?

The Nationally Representative percentile is calculated against all U.S. 11th and 12th graders, including students who never took the SAT, which makes your rank look more flattering than it really is. The User percentile is calculated only against students who actually sat for the SAT, the competitive pool admissions offices actually evaluate. A composite score of 1200, for example, sits at roughly the 74th Nationally Representative percentile but only the 57th–59th User percentile, a gap that can make a borderline school look meaningfully safer than it is.

What SAT score do I need to be in the top 5%, top 10%, or top 25%?

On the User percentile scale, the approximate thresholds are 1510 for the top 5%, 1460 for the top 10%, and 1310 for the top 25%. The median, the top 50%, sits at around 1010, which aligns with the College Board's reported 2025 national average composite of 1029.

What counts as a good SAT score for highly selective schools versus state flagships?

At highly selective schools like MIT and Princeton, the middle-50% SAT bands run roughly 1510–1580 and 1500–1570 respectively, meaning the floor starts around the 90th percentile; a 1490 falls below the 25th percentile at both. State flagship universities like the University of Michigan and UCLA have middle-50% bands closer to the 1300–1530 range, where a score in the 1200s can still be within reach for strong applicants who bring other competitive elements.

Why does my SAT composite percentile not tell the whole story about my chances at a specific school?

National percentile charts are benchmarks against all test-takers, not filters for individual schools. A 1500 at the 96th User percentile still falls below MIT's published 25th-percentile cutoff of 1510, so a high national rank alone cannot tell you whether you are genuinely competitive at a specific institution. The only way to know your real position is to map your score against each school's middle-50% band, the range between the 25th and 75th percentile of its enrolled class, which is published annually in each school's Common Data Set.

Does it matter if my SAT section scores are uneven even if my composite looks strong?

Yes, the composite percentile is a blended number, and blended numbers can hide weaknesses the way a class average hides the student who failed and the one who aced it. Review your section score breakdown before relying on the composite, because an imbalance between Math and Evidence-Based Reading and Writing can affect how your profile looks at schools with specific sectional expectations.