What do the percentiles on the SAT and ACT score report mean? Do colleges use them to evaluate an applicant?
Percentiles are used to gauge how an individual’s score compares to other test takers that day. Parents are sometimes dismayed at what may seem like a high score may not have a correspondingly high percentile ranking. Since colleges do not see the percentile scores, I would largely ignore them for admission purposes. For evaluating a student’s prospects for admission, I would rely mainly on the scores, not the percentiles.
