Your A student is average — don’t blame the SAT and ACT

The Nov. 1 early application deadline for most colleges is almost here. More than at any time in the year — especially since COVID upended many college admissions precedents — I get a litany of questions from parents about the SAT and ACT and college admissions.

The most common refrain from parents is that their child “is a good student but a bad test-taker.” This comment reveals a fundamental disconnect between what parents understand about grades from school and standardized test scores. So here’s what parents need to understand about seemingly divergent grades and test scores, to help them position their kids for academic success.

Some students are, in fact, just bad test takers, which typically means they don’t perform well under pressure. But, in my experience tutoring thousands of students, this explanation only applies to a small percentage of students. In most cases, an alternate explanation is true: Despite having a sky-high GPA in honors classes, the student is actually just an average student.

According to UCLA’s Higher Education Research Institute Freshman Survey, 86 percent of the surveyed students at BA-granting universities had A-averages in high school. Thus, A-averages are not rare at all. They are, in fact, average.

Since we’re discussing average grades, you might wonder what average test scores are. The median SAT score is 1020. The median ACT score is 18. It can be shocking to parents that their A-average student is expected just to break 1000 on the SAT or score around an 18 on the ACT. But those are average scores, and, in today’s academic climate, A-students are, well, average.

But most parents don’t know that their A-student is just average. This makes it extremely difficult to convince them that their A-student should expect average, not stellar, standardized test scores.

The concept goes against 11 years of schooling where they believed their kids were earning above average grades. But they weren’t. This demonstrates just one of the many reasons grade inflation is a significant problem, including expectations around standardized test results.

Put simply, it’s much easier to blame poor test performance on being a “bad test taker” than admitting your kid is average, at least academically speaking.

Last October, John Latting, dean of admissions at Emory, may have said it best: “We’re not as trusting, frankly, of GPA these days,” adding, “Grades are definitely inflated and not as connected to true class performance as they used to be.”

Instead, Emory will be “weighing ‘external assessment’ more heavily than GPA, with a particular focus on AP scores.”

But grade inflation is only part of the problem. In reality, there is another issue at play: Misinformation started by test prep companies has eroded trust in SAT and ACT scores.

To make a quick buck, in the 1980s and 1990s the test prep giants of the past essentially advertised that the SAT and ACT only measure how you do on the SAT and ACT. They argued that the tests are gameable and largely meaningless, and that the smart approach is to do test prep to quickly boost one's scores by learning the secret information that only they possess.

This sales pitch was so effective that a majority of people — yesterday’s students who are today’s parents, teachers and counselors — still believe this. Even if it was partly true at some point, the tests have dramatically changed multiple times since then, and that sales pitch no longer describes the current SAT or ACT.

So what’s the truth? It turns out that the SAT and ACT each cover over 200 topics and skills including vocabulary, rhetorical skills, grammar, mathematics, reading, logical thinking and data analysis. These tests are no longer just about measuring how you do on the tests themselves. They are, in fact, measuring important, meaningful skills that students need to do well in college.

And because the SAT and ACT are standardized assessments covering a broad range of concepts and skills, parents should trust the results to help them understand their child’s academic preparedness. For most students, they should trust the results more than any GPA their child brings home from school.

Not only do the SAT and ACT help predict success in college, but, at some schools, the SAT and ACT are better predictors than a student’s high school grades. Don’t take it from me. Take it from the most highly regarded institutions of higher education:

“SAT and ACT tests are better predictors of Harvard grades than high school grades.”
“Test scores are the single largest predictor of a student’s academic performance at Yale, and this is true over all four years, and it’s true even when we control for every other available variable that we can.”– Mark Dunn, assistant director of admissions at Yale, on the Yale Admissions Podcast
“Standardized test scores are a much better predictor of academic success than high school grades.” – Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, quoted by the New York Times (2024)
“SAT scores have significant predictive value for academic achievement over and above other measures such as high school GPA.” – Dartmouth Admissions Research
Dartmouth puts numbers behind its statement: “High school GPA by itself explains 9 percent of the variation” in the first-year GPA of Dartmouth students. An SAT score by itself explains “about 22 percent of the variation.” Thus, at least for Dartmouth students, SAT/ACT scores are about 2.4 times more predictive of academic success than high school grades.

When you understand what the SAT and ACT are actually testing, this predictive capacity makes perfect sense. The SAT and ACT do not test students on random content or how well they perform an arbitrary task. They evaluate students as designed: measuring a student’s ability on the most fundamental and important knowledge and skills they need for higher education.

Colleges find standardized test scores useful — that’s why test-required, test-optional and even test-blind colleges use them. Although UCLA and UC Berkeley, for instance, are banned by their board of regents from considering SAT and ACT scores, they then instead use AP and IB exam scores for admissions decisions.

The better students and parents understand high school grades and standardized tests, the better they can position themselves for academic success.

David Blobaum serves on the board of directors and is the director of outreach for the National Test Prep Association. In 2013, he co-founded the education company Summit Prep, which provides supplemental education to students.