When writing the SAT, the academic material covered on the exam is not the only thing that is important understand. Knowing how the exam is scored can make a significant difference in your performance, and can lead to strategies that will improve your score. It can also be interesting to learn what goes on behind the scenes to make the SAT and the ACT good predictors of college performance.
So how Does it Work?
One of the most distinctive features of the SAT scoring system is the way in which multiple choice questions are scored. When you get an answer correct on the SAT, you receive 1 mark in the given section. If you do not fill the answer in, you receive 0 marks for the question, but strangely, if you answer a given question incorrectly, you actually lose ¼ of a mark in the relevant section. This means that blindly guessing will gain a net score of zero points, on average. For more information on this topic, see my blog post on whether SAT guessing is worthwhile. However, this means that it is necessary to give each student a free 200 points in each section simply for writing their name, as if someone actually managed to get enough marks incorrect in a section, their mark could actually fall below the original starting point. Since it would be silly to give them a negative score, this strange system where students receive “free” points was created to ensure that all students have a positive score.
Another strange effect of this scoring system is that students can receive fractions of points on a section. What happens then? Well, if a student gets 15 questions correct, 5 wrong, and does not answer 1, they should have a total of 13.75 points in the section. What happens is that if the final score contains a decimal that is .5 or greater, the score will be rounded up. So, in this case, 13.75 becomes 14. However, 13.25 would round down to 13. This means that the third, seventh, eleventh, and so on incorrect answers cause the student to lose two points instead of one. This has a limited usefulness in practical terms, but if a student is aiming for a very high score, and they know they might have missed one or two questions already, they should consider not guessing for the third one they are not sure about in order to save a point. This can be a difference of 20-30 points in some cases, but it is hard to know if an answer would be the third incorrect one.
Luckily for students taking the ACT, there are no scoring oddities like this to worry about. Since no marks are deducted for incorrect answers, it is always beneficial to guess if you are not sure which answer is correct, and there is no need to worry about partial marks or rounding. For SAT students, this information is important to know, since it can have an effect on student results.
This article was written for you by Tobias, one of the tutors with Test Prep Academy.
