What's the Minimum SAT Score for College?
Harvarded
Preparing for college applications can feel confusing, overwhelming, and demanding. If you're nervous about the SAT (or college admissions in general), you might be worried about how low of a test score you can afford to get to still have a shot at college. You might even be wondering how low of a score on the SAT is even possible.
In this article, we'll discuss the lowest possible SAT score and why it's unlikely to happen to you. We'll also offer advice on determining the lowest SAT score you can get to still have a reasonable chance at a given school, and what that means in terms of choosing which schools to apply for and what score to aim for. Finally, we'll go over some things you can do if your score seems too low for any of the colleges you want to attend.
What's the Lowest SAT Score You Can Get?
The SAT uses a scale of 400-1600. The Math section is worth up to 800 points, and the Reading and Writing tests combine into the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing (EBRW) section to give you the other 800 possible points.
The lowest possible score on either section is 200 points. So if you got 200 points on Math and 200 on EBRW, you'd have a total of 400 points. In other words, the minimum SAT score is 400. (For reference, an average score would be around 1050.)
More specifically, a 400 would be the score you'd get if you answered zero questions correctly on any of the sections or just left your entire test blank and took a nap.
This is why getting the lowest possible score is not a common occurrence! In previous years, fewer students have gotten the lowest possible score on the SAT than have received perfect scores, so it is highly unlikely to happen to you (unless you really do leave every question blank, in which case it will definitely happen to you—sorry!).
What SAT Score Would You Get If You Guessed Randomly?
To underscore how unlikely it is that you would get a 400 making a good faith effort on the SAT, let's consider the approximate score you would be likely to get if you guessed completely randomly on every question.
Multiple-choice questions on the SAT have four answer choices each, so you have a 25% chance of guessing the correct answer. On the Math free-response questions, known as grid-ins, your chance of randomly guessing the correct answer is low enough that I'm going to round down to 0% and assume that if you randomly guessed on those, you would get them wrong.
The Reading section has 52 questions. Guessing randomly, you could expect to get (.25) x 52 of them correct; that works out to 13.
The Writing section has 44 questions. Guessing randomly, you could expect to get 11 of them correct (.25 x 44 = 11).
The Math section has 45 multiple-choice questions and 13 grid-ins. Assuming you get 0 points on the grid-ins, you could expect to get (.25) x 45 questions correct, which is about 11.
We'll base our approximate score calculations on the Sample Scoring Guide for Practice Test 1. According to this sample scoring guide, 13 correct answers on Reading gives you a Reading test score of 19 (out of 40), and 11 correct answers on Writing gives you a Writing test score of 16 (also out of 40).
Adding up the 19 on Reading and 16 on Writing gives you a 35 out of 80. If we multiply that by 10 we get 350 for the Evidence-Based Reading and Writing section score, which is a good margin above the minimum of 200. For Math, 11 correct answers would give you a Math section score of 340, also well above the minimum of 200.
By adding together the 340 from Math and the 350 from Evidence-Based Reading and Writing, we get 690. Even guessing completely randomly and leaving all grid-ins blank, you'd still get nearly 300 points higher than the minimum SAT score.
What's the Lowest SAT Score You Can Have and Still Get Into College?
Beyond the lowest possible score, you might want to know what the minimum SAT score for college admissions is. The answer is that it depends—mostly on the college in question, but also to a certain extent on your other qualifications.
In general, the more selective a school is, the higher your SAT scores will need to be for you to have a chance at admission. For a top-tier school like Harvard or MIT, you'll need to break 1450 for a shot (and that would still be a pretty low-end score for a selective school). For a selective public institution like the University of Michigan, you'll want to hit at least 1350.
Less selective public institutions, as well as many small liberal arts colleges, regularly accept applicants in the 950-1050 range.
Public universities in your state might also accept residents with scores on the lower end of the scale depending on their policies and your other qualifications. For example, for Texas residents, UT Austin guarantees admission to anyone in the top 6% of their graduating high school class; there are also other public Texas universities that assure admission for the top 10%. You might still need to submit test scores for these schools for placement purposes, but low scores won't keep you from getting in.
Another thing to note is that specialty schools like art schools and music conservatories also often have lower SAT score expectations, as applications are much more heavily weighted toward things such as portfolios and performance tapes.
The truth is that it's difficult to pinpoint the absolute lowest score you can get and still have a chance at a particular school because colleges and universities generally admit candidates along a range of test scores.
But there are ways you can get an idea of what scores to aim for.
On their admissions websites, most schools provide the test score range for the 25th-75th percentiles of their own admitted student pool—the "middle 50%." This is a reliable way to get a decent idea of what kind of score you need to get to be a viable candidate for admission.
In general, a score a little below a school's 25th percentile SAT score (think 10 points) is the lowest score you could get and reasonably expect to have any sort of chance at admission—and even with other strong parts in your application, that score would make the school a reach for you.
By contrast, if your score is decently (50+) above the 75th percentile mark, you're in a great position.
The following chart shows sample middle 50% ranges, with what would be considered fairly low and high scores:
You might be thinking this: if I have a score that's just below the 25th percentile, doesn't that mean that people with lower scores than me probably got in?
Yes, it does. But there are always outliers—people who had other specific qualifications or strengths that the college was looking for in particular. No doubt you also have unique strengths and talents that you should emphasize in your college applications!
If your dream school's middle 50% is 1100-1300 and your score is 1020, by all means apply to it as a reach school, understanding that the rest of your application will need to be truly stellar for you to have a chance. You should never assume that you are going to be one of the outliers who gets in with an SAT score at the lowest conceivable end of the admit range.
That's why it's important to apply to a variety of schools, where your score falls in different places relative to the middle 50% of admitted students. But how do you go about choosing schools to apply to based on your SAT score?