Why do straight A students score below a 1300 on the SAT? How can it be that a test is not picking up on the genius of your child? They seem to be getting amazing grades, so why doesn’t the SAT correlate with that?
My name’s Brooke. I’ve been coaching the SAT for over two decades. I’ve scored perfectly as an adult on an SAT. I’ve coached students to perfect scores on the test. In my experience, there are several situations and circumstances that I think account for the fact that oftentimes I have students come in and they are scoring in the 1200s on the SAT despite their straight A’s. In fact, I’ve even had students scoring below a thousand with straight A’s. How can that be? Why does this happen? That’s exactly what I’m going to get into.
So, first up, a lot of students have straight A’s to the point where as a consultant, I would say probably 80% of the students I work with have zero B’s. Students that I work with aren’t every student. They’re students who are usually gunning for top colleges, but I would say I get no more than one student per year with even a C. It’s very rare. I just don’t see it because a lot of schools just don’t hand them out. And inevitably what’s happening is there’s just a lot of grade inflation. I mean this is why when we look at the University of California system which has recently gone SAT/ACT blind and UC headlines about UC San Diego having one in eight students not having high school proficiency in algebra—meaning they can’t do basic algebra—and they have to go to remedial math class. One in eight at UC San Diego, which is ranked in the top 50 schools in the country. It’s doing amazing research. There are lots of really smart students there, and they have deficiencies. How does that happen?
It happens because you’re at a high school where your teachers are giving you A’s and you didn’t actually learn what you should have learned in order to get an A. So grade inflation is a huge problem. There was a big study—it’s pretty famous—in 2017 that showed that 47% of high school students had an A average, meaning a 3.5 unweighted GPA or above. And that’s up from 39%. It’s gone up since then. It went up during the pandemic. It came down a little bit, but it’s still above that 47% at this point, just given the data that I’ve seen. But in that same period, the SAT average fell by 24 points. There was another study done about high school GPA and ACT, and they found that high school GPA averages went from 3.48 to 3.59, which is an A average. But ACT scores decrease from 22.51 to 21.90. And if you know anything about the correlation between ACT and SAT, that is not a great score. And the other thing that ACT found is that in 2016, only 37% of students had reached college readiness levels in both math and reading.
Here’s what that means: More than 47% of students are A students, but only 37% of students are ready for college. So basically having an A- average does not guarantee that you’re ready for college. And in fact, 10 to 20% of students who have A-averages are not ready for college. And that’s exactly why UC San Diego had this math debacle. So that’s my first explanation to you. If your student or you are getting less than a 1300 and you have straight A’s, the first finger I would point is toward the potential for grade inflation. And I don’t blame teachers at this point because it’s a rat race. Everybody wants their kids to get into great colleges, and they think if our students don’t have good GPAs, they’re never going to compete. We don’t want to have grade deflation because then they won’t get into colleges. So, let’s just inflate the GPA because we want our students to win. And then, it starts to just become meaningless.
But here’s what I will say: even if their GPA is discrepant because of grade inflation, that doesn’t mean that a student still can’t improve. You can. And it just comes down to learning what you don’t know and improving. That being said, here’s what I have to say about grade inflation: oftentimes when I have students with grade inflation and they’ve got straight A’s, what that means is when they put a hoop in front of your kid at school, your kid was able to jump through that hoop. So oftentimes when I have students who have great GPAs, it’s just a matter of learning things they don’t know. And if they’re willing to put in the time and they’re willing to put in the effort, they definitely can improve and be able to close some of that discrepancy and that gap.
The second reason that I see much lower SAT scores is that the SAT and school do not test the same things. And to make things more complicated, the way that the SAT tests is a multiple-choice test, but that multiple-choice test is not the same in character or in execution as the multiple-choice tests that your kids or you, if you’re the student, have been seeing for years. This is actually something I love to talk about in our group classes so that students understand and have a framework for learning. Students are trained on multiple-choice tests their whole lives. And their whole lives, when they have a multiple-choice test, especially in English class, history class, biology class, etc., their goal is to prove they read or did whatever homework assignment they had. So, these tests that high school students are so used to seeing over and over and over again that are in this multiple-choice format are fairly consistent tests of what I call recall. Meaning, you are recalling facts that you read.
And I’m going to be honest, I get it. A lot of times, high school teachers are just trying to get you to do a little bit of work to read a book. And they’re working so hard to just prove that you read. I mean, this is what drove me nuts about high school: I hated the busy work; it drove me nuts. But inevitably, I get it. Teachers are trying to get you to do a certain level of engagement with the material so that they can run their class. But what it does is it trains you to approach multiple choice in a certain way. And that certain way that you approach multiple-choice questions is assuming that everything is recall. So, when your brain is wired to think, especially with the reading section in particular, “Oh, did I read this in the passage?” if you recognize something, you go, “Yes, ding,” and you put it as the answer. And that’s so many of the detractor answers on the SAT. The SAT knows this. They know that students are operating on a recall level. So, they have all these answer choices that have plenty of details that were in the passage. And the only way that you’re going to get the right answer is not by recalling facts, but by analyzing the situation and going a level deeper.
When I was in school, my teachers taught me a hierarchy of thinking called Bloom’s taxonomy. And in Bloom’s taxonomy, you can see at the bottom level is recall, and in higher levels, we have things like analysis or even synthesis. The SAT is going to require you to engage in these higher levels of thinking. And to do so requires students to do two things. One, to throw out the way that they’ve approached tests for so much of their life that has given them success in the classroom. And two, learn how to engage in different modes of thinking when they’re doing multiple choice, which is just a totally different exercise.
So in that sense, two things are going on. One, we need to get rid of habits and rewire our habits because it’s just a different test. And two, we want to learn to engage in these kinds of analysis skills that oftentimes students are never taught. They’re never taught to figure out nuanced differences between little tiny pieces of expression. Maybe they are if they’re doing the New York Times summer program in journalism, but most of the students that I’m working with, they are not at that level of analysis out the gate.
Now, math questions. So, here’s the challenge with math questions because math is not necessarily recall. You don’t read a book and then regurgitate it. Math in general at American high schools is often very formulaic, meaning that the textbook has particular sets of problems. They give you an example of how to do each type of problem, and then you have a practice set of homework where you do problems that look pretty close to exactly what you did. And then you rinse and repeat. And you can do this for all kinds of problem types. And then you go through, and you’ve done all the problems in the end. And what a lot of American high school math classes aren’t doing is they’re not teaching students to solve problems that go beyond what the cookie-cutter textbook expectations are. We have our checkpoints and standards, and we just try to check those off. And a lot of high school math is not teaching you to creatively problem-solve or think outside the box.
So, that’s the first thing that’s missing from a lot of American math curriculum. Not all of it, but a lot of it is that we’re not building problem-solvers. We’re building cookie-cutter math brains. And then that does not translate to the SAT in the same way. And so that’s why we see discrepancies in those math scores, because when your kids or you as a student were given a task, it’s always: here’s this type of problem and seven examples of this type of problem, then learn how to do that type of problem and do it again on the test. But there’s this underlying idea of problem-solving. How do you be clever? How do you approach something from all sides? How do you see math multi-dimensionally that in many cases isn’t taught?
And the other problem with the math is that the math doesn’t look like your math book. And why doesn’t it look like your math book? Well, it’s multiple choice. And when you have a multiple-choice test, if they formatted it like your math book, people could back-solve the questions. If it was just an algebra question where you’ve got a system of equations and need to solve for x and y, there are two problems with that. One, now you have Desmos; you just throw it into Desmos and have Desmos do all the math for you. Two, you could back-solve and use the answers and plug them in. Well, the College Board and everybody else who runs standardized tests have figured that out. And so in order to create problems that you can’t just backsolve, that you can’t just graph the solution, that you have to understand the concepts at play, they’ve created questions that are a little bit more complex, a little bit harder to get at, and that don’t look like the questions that you encounter in school. And a lot of times when students encounter questions that don’t look like what they’re used to, several things can happen. One, they can just freak out and not get it right. Two, they can just not know what to do and get stuck. Three, they can spend eons trying to figure out how to do that question and then run out of time on the rest of the question. But any way you dice it, it can be a problem.
In any case, again, this can be studied. Students can study math. They can study these question types and they can learn problem solving and learn how to take a step forward even when you feel like you’re in the dark. What do you know? What do you have? What do you need? If I don’t know how to get to what I need, I take what I have and I think about what I know and I say, “How can I step forward?” And then you fight. And if one thing doesn’t work, you try another thing. If that doesn’t work, you try another thing. And you fight, and then you give up after 60 seconds or so and bookmark it and come back to it at the end just in case.
Which brings me to number three. The third reason that I see students scoring below a 1300 when they’re A students is that they have a lack of strategy on the test. Sometimes students completely bomb the SAT because they’re just not familiar with it. They don’t know how to approach it. They don’t know what to do with themselves. In particular, one of the biggest issues is because this test, again, is not like the test they’re used to in school. It can really rattle them. Think about—if you’re a high school student—how many kids you know in the last week who got 100% on a quiz or a test. And I would say you probably know some. How many kids do you know that got a perfect score on the SAT? Zero, maybe one. My point is it’s rare. It’s very rare, because this test is harder than a normal test. This test is designed so that if you do really well in it, you probably missed four or eight questions. It’s designed for you to miss things because if it wasn’t so hard that you’d miss some stuff, then they wouldn’t be able to look at the rarified students and figure out who’s at the top and who’s like a little bit below the top.
But approaching a test where you’re not getting everything right, when you’re this straight A student who’s used to just getting 100% on all your little easy quizzes and recall English tests, it can really rock your world. And when it rocks your world, sometimes people just make bad choices. They spend way too much time on one question and not enough time on another. They don’t understand how to manage their time, how to manage their resources, or how to give up and move on. And without that kind of thing, like I’ve seen, you know, occasionally we have students, and they go up a 100 points just by not falling into a cesspool of wasted time trying to get everything right or not being OCD. You know, I’ve worked with students who are OCD, and they want to get everything right. And I love telling them, “Okay, we’re going to flip the script. I want you to get four questions wrong. If you don’t choose four questions to get wrong, you’ve failed.” Because if they just got four wrong, they’d have a great score, and we think they’re capable of it.
Finally, the fourth reason that I see a huge discrepancy between students’ SAT scores and their grades is test anxiety. I can also call this mindset. I had a student the other day who was talking to me and came in with a score that is well below what she knows she did on a practice test. And it’s like, okay, how did you go from here to this on test day? And it’s that internal script where you start telling yourself, “Oh, I’m not going to do as well on this as I think I am. Oh, I don’t know how to do this. Oh, this test is so hard.” When you start telling yourself these things, then rather than thinking, “Okay, what do I have? What do I know? What do I need? How do I take one step forward? I see this is where I’m starting, this is where I want to end up, and I know some fun facts in between,” you start thinking, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know how to get from there to there.” And then you just give up before you try. And you don’t become that problem solver. And that’s where test anxiety can really rear its head. If you have that self-doubt, if you have bad self-talk in the middle of the test, you paralyze yourself while taking it. That’s test anxiety. I have students too who hyperventilate during the test or who get so nervous that their brains are in a mush. I have other students who will prep and prep and prep, and we know they have test anxiety. The first time they take the test, what happens is we change up all of their strategies of how they approach it. Their practice test scores went way up. You know, they went 200 points up on their practice test scores. And then they show up on test day and the test confronts them and suddenly all the things that we talked about, all the strategies, all the techniques that they learned, they just throw them away and they start doing what they did two months ago, which is read the question. Everything just goes to mush.
That being said, with test anxiety, if that’s the reason that your score is low, there are ways to deal with it. Sometimes it’s understanding that it’s going to take you more tries to get the score that you want than it might take other students. Sometimes it’s navigating this with two tests, with the ACT and the SAT, so you have more lottery tickets in your pocket. So every test taken doesn’t feel like the end of the world. You have a lot of options; you get a lot of lottery tickets. There are ways to deal with it. But in any case, it can certainly create a discrepancy between your score and what you’re capable of. In any case, I hope you guys like this blog and that it was helpful!
If you’re looking to boost your test scores, check out our self-paced online courses for the SAT and ACT! For a more one-on-one approach, see if our tutoring options are right for you!
