Both the ACT and SAT subscores provide students with detailed information about their weaknesses and strengths in categories more specific than English, Reading, Math, Science, and Writing (ACT) or Reading, Writing, Math, and Essay-writing (SAT). Understanding the implications of that detailed information, however, can be difficult, due to the sheer number of scores.
In this article, we'll discuss how subscores can be useful to students and whether or not subscores on one test can indicate how a student would do on the other.
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In addition to total scores out of 36 and 1600 and section scores out of 36 and 800 (or out of 40 for individual "test scores" on SAT Reading, Writing, and Math), the ACT and SAT both provide students with subscores. The stated goals of these subscores are to “provide more detail about student achievement” (SAT) and give students a "better understanding [of] strengths and areas for improvement in each subject"(ACT).
The subscores calculated on each test fall under one of two different categories:
The short answer: yes, some subscores can be compared.
The closest relationships are between the SAT and ACT essay subscores, followed by the SAT Writing and ACT English subscores. In practical terms, this means, for example, that students who score highly on all the ACT essay subscores can expect to do fairly well on the SAT essay subscores, while students who don't do well on ACT English subscores can anticipate similarly poor results on SAT Writing subscores.
By contrast, it's unlikely that students would see any relationship between their subscores on SAT Evidence-Based Reading and Writing and ACT Reading, because the subscores measure such different things. If you get high ACT Reading subscores, that's great, but it doesn't tell you anything about how you'd do on Evidence-Based Reading and Writing subscores. This is even more true for ACT Science, since the only science-related subscore on the SAT measures something completely different from what the ACT Science subscores are trying to capture.
Subscores for SAT/ACT Math fall into the middle between the highly comparable SAT/ACT essay and Writing/English subscores and the divergent SAT/ACT Reading subscores. There is some overlap between what the Math subscores measure across the two tests, but the correspondence is a little fuzzier. A high subscore on ACT's Algebra subscore could mean you'd get a high score on SAT's Heart of Algebra subscore, but you could just as easily get a medium score because there's a considerable difference in what the Algebra questions on each test are meant to measure.
But why would you want to compare subscores across the SAT and ACT?
The biggest reason is that doing so can give you more information about whether or not it's worth taking both the SAT and the ACT. For instance, if you take the ACT and score poorly on certain subscores in ACT English, you can expect to not do any better on the SAT Writing versions of those subscores (and thus on SAT Writing). Conversely, even if you did poorly on some of the ACT Math subscores, there's a much better chance that you could do better on the related SAT Math subscores and get a relatively higher overall SAT Math score.
The head on the right is ACT Math subscores, the head on the left is SAT subscores, and you're the goateed man in the middle, wondering if you should take the SAT as well. It's. it's not a perfect representation.
So what are the different subscores, and which ones are comparable? We’ll start off by comparing different reporting categories for the SAT and ACT, section by section.
Reporting categories function similarly on the SAT and ACT in that they both attempt to break down entire sections like English or Math into more specific skills that students can then focus on. There is a slight difference in how questions are sorted into different subscores, however: on the ACT, a question is always grouped into at least one subscore category, while on the SAT there are some questions on the Math and Reading sections that don't fall into any specific reporting category.
One other difference between the way section-level subscores are used on the SAT and ACT is that on the SAT, subscores are scaled to a range of 1-15, while on the ACT, subscores are measured on a scale of 0-100%. As you'll see in the more detailed analyses below, the number of questions that go into each subscore varies a little bit more on the ACT than on the SAT, so a percentage reporting system makes more sense for the ACT.
Important caveat: our descriptions of correspondence between the different subscores on the SAT and ACT are based purely on content (what the subscores say they're measuring), rather than empirical data on correlations between different subscores (since that data is not currently available). We'll update this article if and when that data is released.
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Out of the 58 questions that appear on the Math section of the SAT, there are three no-calculator and three calculator questions that don't apply towards any subscore, leaving 52 questions to fall into one of three non-overlapping categories: Heart of Algebra, Problem Solving and Data Analysis, and Passport to Advanced Math.
Name
# of questions
Score Range
Heart of Algebra
19 (8 no calculator, 11 with calculator)
Problem Solving and Data Analysis
17 (all with calculator)
Passport to Advanced Math
16 (9 no calculator, 8 with calculator)
In contrast to the relatively straightforward division of questions on SAT Math, ACT Math reports eight different subscores to students. Two of these subscore (Preparing for Higher Math and Integrating Essential Skills) cover all 60 ACT Math questions; of the remaining categories, five are further divisions of Preparing for Higher Math, while one (Modeling) measures questions from both the Preparing for Higher Math and Integrating Essential Skills subscore categories.
Name
# of questions
Score Range
Preparing for Higher Math
