What Is A Good SAT Score? 2026 Benchmarks, Percentiles & Target Scores

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What is a Good SAT Score?

It’s pretty important for USA aspirants to know what Good, Bad and Execellent SAT scores are. Do you want to compare your existing SAT score with your new one or with your friends?

This article has assembled the way which would help USAns (NRIs) to access their SAT score against the other test takers. It will help you to figure out the good SAT score for you.

At the end of this article, you would find out SAT score ranges of 41 popular schools and knows what to do if your SAT score is lower than you expected.

What’s a Good SAT Score?

Let’s know about it.

Your total SAT score ranges from 400-1600 and if it splits into two section scores, then 200-800 for each. The fact is one section score is Maths and another is a combined Reading and Writing score known as EBRW (Evidence-Based Reading and Writing).

Obviously, you expect to score high as much as you can in your SAT exam. However, there is a particular SAT score cut off, which turns a score ‘good’.

To analyze your SAT score, among other test takers, you should know how SAT scoring work. The fact is the total score you have scored out of 1600 corresponds to a percentile ranking. The percentile you have scored would tell you what percentage of test takers you scored better than. Suppose, you got the 65^th percentile score, means you have scored better than 65% of all students attempted the SAT test.

The average SAT composite score is 1068. The average score for Math is 531 while the average score for EBRW is 536.

Following, you will find SAT composite scores for 2018, which helps you to figure out the score distribution for yourself:

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Moreover, below is another SAT score percentile depicting Math and EBRW sections individually.

What’s a Good SAT Score for You?

Now the question is what good SAT scores for you? Have you noticed in the first table, the 84th percentile score has 1280 marks? It means you scored better than 84% among others.

Kindly note that 1280 would be a solid score for colleges like the University of Cincinnati (average SAT score: 1233), Arizona State University (average: 1232), and Temple University (average: 1221).

But this score is very low for other US’s universities, namely, the University of Chicago, MIT, Caltech, Duke, and Johns Hopkins.

Moreover, there are some options which give admission even in the low score like 1040 such as USAna University Northwest (average SAT score: 1015) and California State University (average: 1005).

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Do you Know Good SAT Scores for Reputed Colleges in the US:

With an intention to accomplish your score goals, we have made some efforts. Following, you will find out an SAT score chart with the 75th and 25th percentile SAT scores for 2018 for 40 reputed colleges: