1968 SAT Percentile Rankings

Percentile ranks of 1960, '66-'68 SAT subscores

The following data was sent to me by Patrick T. Wahl:

"I finally dug out my standardized test scores from the sixties. The official data in my 1969 booklet is given only by quintiles, not particularly helpful. However, the 1968 booklet (which reports my scores for the May 1969 S.A.T. exam) gives quite a wealth of data.

There are charts for both juniors and seniors. I will omit the juniors, and send herewith the three charts for seniors. Note that the data is separated by gender. References to "boys and girls" rather than "men and women" are typical dialect for the time of this booklet. It is interesting to observe the verbal versus math results for the two gender groups.

On two later reports, male and female groups showed almost identical verbal scores, while in the 1960 report, women won a clear verbal advantage over men.

On all three reports, math scores showed about a 50-point advantage to men, over a broad range of abilities. This may make the reader suspect an error, but I promise to send only proofread data, as printed in the source.

Any consequences of these disparate results towards the Mega Test norming are left to be pondered. But it is worth pondering."

Table 4 (from page 6):

Percentile ranks: SAT, representative national sample of all seniors. (Based on a special test administration in the Fall of 1966 to 17,000 high school seniors.)

Score	Boys Verbal	Boys Mathematical	Girls Verbal	Girls Mathematical
800	99+	99+	99+	99+
750	99+	99+	99+	99+
700	99+	98	99	99
650	98	94	98	97
600	95	89	95	95
550	89	81	89	90
500	80	72	80	83
450	69	61	69	73
400	55	48	55	62
350	43	37	40	48
300	28	21	25	30
250	14	5	11	9
200	4	1-	4	1-
Average score	390	422	393	382

Table 5 (from page 8):

Percentile ranks: SAT, seniors who later enter college (Based on the scores of 3,537 high school seniors who were tested in a special administration in 1960 and who later entered college.) [Note: 1960 is correct, so these data are not directly comparable to the other tables. -- PTW]

Score	Boys Verbal	Boys Mathematical	Girls Verbal	Girls Mathematical
800	99+	99+	99+	99+
750	99+	99+	99+	99+
700	99	96	98	99
650	95	87	92	94
600	89	76	83	87
550	81	61	72	76
500	69	44	58	61
450	54	31	43	45
400	37	18	27	28
350	22	9	18	15
300	14	2	9	3
250	1	1-	4	1-
200	1-	1-	1-	1-
Average score	440	509	467	461

Table 6 (from page 9):

Percentile ranks: SAT, all seniors tested in the College Board Admissions Testing Program (Based on all students who took the test as seniors during the period May 1967 through March 1968.)

Score	Boys Verbal	Boys Mathematical	Girls Verbal	Girls Mathematical
800	99+	99+	99+	99+
750	99	98	99+	99+
700	98	94	98	98
650	94	87	94	95
600	87	77	88	88
550	78	63	78	78
500	65	47	65	63
450	48	32	46	46
400	31	19	30	29
350	16	9	15	15
300	6	3	6	6
250	1	1-	2	1
200	1-	1-	1-	1-
Average score	463	510	464	466
Number tested	488,793	488,793	398,672	398,672

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