Average in each section is around 500. Good news is it’s much easier to gain 100 points per section when you’re below the average rather than above. Poke around this site, you can get your score up quite a bit.

Regards,
Jason

I’ve been taking practice tests from the Princeton Review book and the Collegeboard book, but no matter how much I solve these math problems I feel like I’m not improving.
The last time I took the SAT, I studied a lot for the math part. I basically took a SAT course where I had to solve lots and lots of problems. But I still got below 700. Is it just me or am I studying wrong? Now I’m trying to analyze why I got the problems wrong, but I don’t know if it’s working.

I always run out of time too. What should my study plan be over the summer?

1940′s pretty solid. To get 2100 you really gotta know strategies for the test. Best place to start with the math section is my free e-course.

You need to figure it out for each of the three subsections. I’ll do the math section for you and you can do the others . . .

For starters, guessing is a wild card so be sure to read my guessing post to address whether you should guess or not. Guessing isn’t a factor in the formula you’re after, but leaving questions blank is.

Here’s a formula you can use to toy with how many questions you need to get right to hit your target score in a given section:

RS = Raw Score
AQ = Attempted Questions
PC = Percent Correct of attempted questions

RS = (PC)(AQ)/100 – (AQ)((100-PC)/400)

Now from a math point of view, we could clean this up by factoring and such but I think it’s clearer to leave as is so you can see the raw score is simply the number of correct questions minus 1/4 of the number of missed questions. Your actual score may be slightly higher as there’s no 1/4 point deduction for missed grid-in questions (10/54).

To get a 600 in math you need a raw score of 38 (from pg. 439 in The Official SAT Study Guide). You can get this raw score many different ways. At one extreme, you can answer every single question (54), get 76% correct (41) and get a RS of 38 (from above formula). Another example is leaving 1/5 of them blank (so AQ = 43) and getting 91% of those answered correct (39/43).

You’ll notice for the writing section that there’s one more variable — the essay score. I’d suggest running the numbers with a 4 or 5 on the essay if you’re a candidate for 600 overall. Toy with the numbers and let me know if you have any more questions!

Say for instance, I wanted an 1800, is there a method that i can use to know exatly how many problems that I can get wrong and how many I can guess on to get the score I desire?

To get your overall score you just add the three subscores. So yours is 1250. A 250-point gain is doable with some prep.

The best place to start is to buy the only printed SAT book worth purchasing: “The Official SAT Study Guide” exclusively for its 8 full length practice tests. Take one and score it. You’ll then know specifically where to need to improve. Be sure to take my free ecourse if you haven’t already. Happy to help you if you have any other SAT questions.

-i made a 410 on critical reading
-a 430 on math
-and a 410 on writing.

whats my overall score( for an example 1500,1100,1300)
please help!