Editorial policy

SAT Score Calculators publishes 21 guides alongside its calculators. This page sets out the rules that content is written to.

Sourcing

• Primary sources first. Facts about scoring come from College Board and ACT documents, not from other test-prep sites.
• Every article lists the sources used, with the date each was retrieved. Specific claims link to the document that supports them.
• Where a figure has a vintage, such as a cohort year or a validity window, the sentence says so. An undated statistic is a statistic that will silently become wrong.
• If something cannot be sourced, the article says it cannot be sourced. It does not get filled in with a plausible number.

Corrections

Errors are fixed at the source. When a figure is wrong, the underlying data file and the extraction script are corrected, not just the sentence, so the same error does not return the next time the data is re-pulled. The updated date on the page changes when its content does.

Reports of errors are welcome and are checked against the source document rather than argued about. See contact.

Writing for this audience

Most readers here are between 15 and 18, often anxious, usually on a phone, frequently checking a score they are unhappy with. That shapes the rules:

• No verdicts on a score. Scores are placed in the published distribution and left there. The site does not say a score is good, bad, strong or disappointing, and it does not colour-code results.
• No manufactured urgency. No countdowns, no scarcity, no implication that a reader is behind.
• No motivational filler. Someone looking for a number should get the number, not encouragement they did not ask for.
• Lead with the answer. The first paragraph of every guide answers the question in its title.
• Content and advertising kept appropriate for a teenage audience.

Independence

This site sells nothing. There is no tutoring service, no course, no book and no affiliate relationship with a test-prep company. Advertising is served by a third-party network, and advertisers have no influence over the data, the methodology or the written content. An advertisement is not an endorsement.

How the guides were produced

Research is conducted against primary sources and then adversarially checked, with a specific hunt for two failure modes: material that has quietly gone out of date, and numbers that sound authoritative but are not actually in the document they are attributed to. Both are common in this subject, because the SAT went digital in 2024 and the ACT changed format in 2025, and a great deal of published material still describes the older tests as current.

Everything published is reviewed by the editor before it goes live, and the editor is accountable for it.

What gets refused

Some things are not published here at any price. Conversion tables that cannot be traced to a published document. Routing thresholds and score ceilings that are not published. AP cut points presented as fact. National Merit cutoffs described as official. Each of these exists elsewhere on the internet, and each is guesswork wearing the clothes of data. The full list is on the methodology page.