The SAT II score and it's national percentile which one is better reference factor?

mifune
Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:30:26 +0000

The Chinese percentiles are probably lower than they should be because a lot of people who take it are probably native speakers.



Yes, certainly.



Yup, and the score – not percentile – tells them that.



The scores provide benchmarks of a student’s understanding of the material on a test. But it is completely unfair to evaluate two scores on two different tests equally due to discrepancies in scoring curves, difficulty, and so on. The composite score simply does not provide performance comparisons across other Subject Tests. For instance, a 770 on the Chinese exam correlates to the 33rd percentile. However, a score of 540 on the Literature exam is parallel to the 32nd percentile. It would be irrational to assess them equally by scaled score simply because each performance is virtually identical compared with those who took each respective test. I too have surfaced this exact question with college representatives from the University of Chicago, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania, and all three affirmed that the percentiles are much more indicative of performance.