A student scores 1450 on the SAT. A friend scores 33 on the ACT. They compare notes and decide the scores are "basically the same." They're right — but not because 1450 and 33 are arithmetically equivalent in any way. They're right because of a specific statistical crosswalk published by the College Board and ACT in 2018, and understanding how that table is built matters for more than just trivia. It determines how colleges read both scores, which test you should sit, and whether your super-score meaningfully differs from a single-sitting result.
What concordance actually means
Concordance is a percentile crosswalk. The College Board and ACT took large samples of students who took both tests and lined up the score distributions. A 1450 on the SAT puts a student at roughly the 97th percentile of SAT takers. A 33 on the ACT puts a student at roughly the same 97th percentile of ACT takers. So the concordance table says 1450 ≈ 33. The two scores aren't equivalent in content, and they aren't equivalent in absolute difficulty. They're equivalent in relative rank.
This is different from, say, converting Fahrenheit to Celsius. That conversion is a fixed formula based on physical measurement. Concordance is empirical, based on how actual students performed, and it changes any time either test is redesigned enough to shift the score distribution. Our SAT to ACT converter and ACT to SAT converter use the official 2018 table — the current version colleges rely on.
Why the 2018 update was needed
The SAT was substantially redesigned in 2016. The old 2400-scale test (800 Math, 800 Critical Reading, 800 Writing) was replaced with a 1600-scale test (800 Math, 800 Evidence-Based Reading and Writing) with different content, different scoring, and a shifted difficulty curve. The old 2006 concordance table, built on the pre-2016 SAT, suddenly no longer reflected the actual percentile relationships.
ACT and the College Board jointly recalibrated. The 2018 concordance study sampled students who took both the redesigned SAT and the ACT and rebuilt the percentile map. The result is the table you'll see on every admissions website today. Notably, some scores shifted meaningfully between the old and new tables — a 1300 SAT used to be roughly 28 ACT and is now closer to 27, because the redesigned SAT runs slightly "easier" at the upper-middle range and therefore needs a somewhat higher raw score to hit the same percentile.
A worked example: the 1450 / 33 equivalence
Going deeper on the 1450 SAT / 33 ACT pair: in recent data, roughly 3% of SAT test-takers score 1450 or higher. Roughly 3% of ACT test-takers score 33 or higher. The two scores sit at the same point in their respective distributions, which is the only sense in which they're "the same."
A 1500 SAT corresponds to approximately a 34 ACT (around the 99th percentile for both). A 1400 SAT corresponds to approximately a 31 ACT. A 1300 SAT corresponds to approximately a 27 ACT. The mapping isn't linear because the percentile distributions aren't linear — the top of each scale is compressed (lots of students clustered at 1500+ and 34+), and the middle is stretched out.
What concordance can't tell you
Concordance gives you the expected equivalence on average across many students. It does not tell you which test you personally will score higher on. That depends on content style. The SAT emphasises slower, more analytical reading, with evidence-support questions that chain across passages, and a math section with formula references and no-calculator segments. The ACT emphasises speed, more direct reading comprehension, a science section that's really data interpretation, and a math section that runs from easy to hard linearly.
A student who reads fast and handles charts well often scores higher on the ACT than their concordance would predict. A student who prefers to slow down and work through dense passages often scores higher on the SAT. The only reliable way to know is to take a full-length timed practice of each and compare the results through the concordance table. If the ACT practice test hits 32 and the SAT practice test hits 1350, the student's real ACT-equivalent from the SAT is only about 29 — so the ACT is the stronger sitting.
Superscoring and why colleges concordance the higher score
Many colleges superscore both tests — they take the highest section scores across all sittings and combine them. A student who scored 730 Math / 680 Reading in March and 690 Math / 720 Reading in May would have a superscore of 730 Math / 720 Reading = 1450, even though they never actually scored 1450 on a single sitting.
When a college superscores both the SAT and the ACT, they typically run concordance on the higher of the two. If your superscored SAT is 1450 (≈ 33 ACT) and your superscored ACT is 32, the college reads you as a 33-equivalent applicant. This is why sending both sets of scores rarely hurts — the higher one gets read, the lower one gets ignored. The one exception is if a college explicitly asks for all scores to be sent, in which case admissions readers do see the full history.
Test-optional policies and what that changed
Since 2020, hundreds of US colleges moved to test-optional policies where applicants can choose whether to submit scores. Concordance still matters for the students who do submit, because admissions readers are comparing submitted SAT scores to submitted ACT scores using the same 2018 table. If anything, concordance matters more in test-optional contexts, because the students who submit tend to be at the high end of the distribution, and small percentile differences translate to bigger apparent score gaps.
Some colleges have moved to test-blind (will not consider scores even if sent). In that context concordance is irrelevant to admissions, though scores may still matter for merit scholarships and placement decisions. And some colleges have reverted to required testing, where concordance is back to being central. The landscape is still shifting; the arithmetic of the concordance table is not.
A related point: the AP exam score is not on this table
Students sometimes assume their 5 on an AP exam concords to a specific SAT or ACT score. It doesn't. AP scores are on a different scale entirely (1 to 5, criterion-referenced against college-level mastery of a subject) and measure different things. Our AP exam score predictor is a separate tool for a separate purpose — it estimates an AP result from practice-section performance, not from SAT or ACT scores.
The honest summary: concordance is a percentile map, updated when either test changes meaningfully, and it's the same table every admissions office uses. It tells you where your score sits relative to other test-takers, which is exactly the question colleges are trying to answer when they compare scores across applicants who took different tests. It does not tell you which test you'll personally do better on, and it does not substitute for taking actual timed practice.