Who makes the ACT-SAT conversion?

drusba
Thu, 29 Nov 2007 14:10:35 +0000

Those popular conversion charts you see on-line, which should only be viewed as a general guide, seem to be incorrect because, in fact, they are incorrect if you are talking about now rather than long past. The one thing those tables do prove is that most people fail to read the fine print.

The folks at College Board created a conversion chart that it has had on-line for years. What most fail to read is the bullet points at the bottom, one of which says:

“Data in this table is based on 103,525 test takers who took both the SAT and the ACT between October 1994 and December 1996.”

College Board has never done another study since then. Its table is the genesis for all those popular ones you find on-line. Even those that now seem to convert the ACT score to the new SAT score simply took that old table and pro rated the numbers, e.g., a 1400 SAT on the old comparison table is now simply a 2100, and they did no new studies.

In other words, the tables you usually find on-line would be correct if you were living in 1996 but are now long out-dated. You should be aware that many colleges that do comparison tables (and many do not) create their own based on more recent test score data and those tables vary from what you find on-line, and, as a result, at many colleges ACT scores now compare to higher SAT scores than they did before – an example is the UT Austin article with the Texas table mentioned above which itself is now outdated since it is based on data from 1999 and 2000.