A student at a French lycée who receives a first SAT score does not know how to read it. Is 1350 good? Should they retake it? And what number do Stanford or Michigan expect? The answers exist, published by the College Board and by the universities themselves. They all say the same thing: a good score depends on the list of universities, and for the most selective ones, the margin is narrow.
What is a good SAT score?
The SAT is scored from 400 to 1600, the sum of two sections each scored from 200 to 800: Reading and Writing, and Math. The College Board publishes two percentiles for each score. The first compares with a representative sample of American high school students. The second, the "user percentile", compares with the students who actually took the test over the last three years, and it is the one that matters, since the other applicants to the same universities belong to that group.
| Total score | User percentile | National percentile |
|---|---|---|
| 1550 | 99 | 99+ |
| 1500 | 97 | 99 |
| 1450 | 95 | 99 |
| 1400 | 93 | 97 |
| 1300 | 85 | 91 |
| 1200 | 75 | 81 |
| 1100 | 62 | 67 |
| 1000 | 47 | 48 |
A 1300 therefore puts a student ahead of 85% of test takers. It is a very good score for a large public university, and not enough for most of the most selective ones.
What SAT score for Stanford, Yale, Columbia or Michigan
Every university publishes a Common Data Set, a standard questionnaire whose section C9 gives the scores of its first-year students. The table shows the middle range, from the 25th to the 75th percentile, of students who enrolled in autumn 2025: a quarter scored below the first figure, a quarter above the second.
| University | SAT total | Reading and Writing | Math |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stanford | 1520 to 1570 | 750 to 780 | 770 to 800 |
| Columbia | 1510 to 1560 | 740 to 777 | 760 to 800 |
| Yale | 1480 to 1560 | 730 to 780 | 740 to 790 |
| Harvard | not published | 720 to 770 | 730 to 790 |
| Georgetown | 1405 to 1530 | 710 to 760 | 700 to 780 |
| Michigan (Ann Arbor) | 1370 to 1530 | 690 to 750 | 680 to 780 |
MIT publishes figures for admitted rather than enrolled students, by section only: 740 to 780 in Reading and Writing, 780 to 800 in Math for the class of 2029.
For a student at a French lycée, the reading is done section by section. In maths, the French specialist maths programme covers most of the test, and a good student can aim for 780 or 800: a 720 in maths stands out in a file presenting a scientific profile. The Reading and Writing section is harder for a student who reads and writes in French all day, and it is often where the gap between 1450 and 1530 is decided.
SAT required or optional in 2026-2027
After the years when the test was optional, most of the most selective universities require it again. For applications submitted in 2026-2027, the SAT or ACT is required at MIT, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Brown and Dartmouth. Princeton and Columbia keep it optional this year and will require it from the following cycle. Harvard accepts other exams, such as the French baccalauréat, only "in exceptional cases". Dartmouth, for a student at school outside the United States, accepts a national school-leaving exam instead; the others do not.
Even where the test remains optional, most enrolled students send one: 79% at Harvard, 67% at Yale, 50% at Columbia. A student from a French lycée, whose grades out of 20 are hard for an American reader to place, has every reason to provide a score that compares directly with others.
Superscoring: retaking the SAT without risk
MIT, Stanford, Yale, Dartmouth and Brown take the best score in each section, across all sittings: this is superscoring. A student who scores 760 in maths in November and 740 in Reading and Writing in March applies with the best combination of the two. At these universities, retaking the test therefore does not lower the score that counts.
SAT score calculators and French equivalents
There is no official conversion table between an SAT score and a baccalauréat average, in either direction. Online calculators promising an equivalence rely on no official table. The only reliable tool to estimate a score is the College Board's Bluebook app, which offers full-length practice tests, adaptive and scored like the real exam.
Dated figures. Percentiles published by the College Board (students from the last three school years); scores of students enrolled in autumn 2025 taken from each university's 2025-2026 Common Data Set; testing policies in force for 2026-2027 applications, as published by the universities in October 2026.
Setting a target and getting organised
The right target is set from the list of universities: aim for the top of the range of the most selective ones, not the bottom. A first practice test in Bluebook gives the starting point, and the gap between that point and the target tells you how many months of work to plan. For dates and registration from France, see Taking the SAT from a French lycée.
For the maths section, I prepare students in private lessons, and Summit, our digital SAT practice platform, is freely available with our other free tools. For the overall strategy, choice of universities, calendar and application, that is the work of Carmine.