How many wrong in the reading and writing section can I get and have a 700 or higher ?

Answer 1

What Sofia said is accurate, and I like the way she put it in terms of a universal conversion. I am a bit of a "numberphile" myself, so I want to examine some data to corroborate what she stated. Keep in mind, your Verbal score is based on the sum of your scaled scores from the Reading and Writing and Language sections, each of which go from 10-40. Thus, you could earn a 700 on the Verbal portion of the test in numerous ways, say, with a 35/35, or with a more unbalanced 40/30 or 30/40. To hit that 700, then, your score in either Verbal section cannot dip below a 30. Based on information I could find through a test prep company that tracks SAT curves from April 2016 through April 2019, the following is a summary of how many questions you could miss from thirteen different administrations of official tests and still hit certain scaled scores:

Reading:

Scaled score of 30 (14-19 questions incorrect, with an average of 16.46 incorrect responses)

Scaled score of 35 (5-9 questions incorrect, with an average of 7.23 incorrect responses)

Scaled score of 40 (0-1 questions incorrect, with an average of 0.23 incorrect responses) (Yes, that is right: 3/13 tests allowed someone to miss a question and still earn a perfect scaled score.)

Writing and Language:

Scaled score of 30 (8-15 questions incorrect, with an average of 12.38 incorrect responses)

Scaled score of 35 (4-6 questions incorrect, with an average of 5.36 incorrect responses) Note: not all tests allow students to earn a 35--2 tests within the sample jumped from 34 to 36.

Scaled score of 40 (0-1 questions incorrect, with an average of 0.08 incorrect responses) (Basically, you need to ace the Writing and Language section to get that 40, with a single test of the 13 allowing for a mistake.)

With these data in hand, we can take a look at some of the score combinations I mentioned earlier. I will use the averages calculated above.

35/35 - Reading (7 incorrect) + Writing and Language (5 incorrect) = 12 incorrect altogether

40/30 - Reading (0 incorrect) + Writing and Language (12 incorrect) = 12 incorrect altogether

30/40 - Reading (16 incorrect) + Writing and Language (0 incorrect) = 16 incorrect altogether

It would seem as if missing anywhere from 12-16 questions altogether could net you a Verbal score around 700. Furthermore, it would appear as if there were a more generous allowance for incorrect responses in the Reading section, but never bank on missing only x questions. With test-day anxiety factored in, you could underperform. As I like to say, practice may not lead to perfection, but it can lead to prediction: the more you practice under timed conditions and get consistent results, the more reliably you can interpret your practice scores.

Thanks for the question. I love running such analyses, and maybe this information can be of some use to tutors and students alike.

Andrew

Answer 2

Hello! This depends on the particular version or day of the test that you sat for. The SAT is scored using an equating system, and so to account for variability in difficulty of the test there is not a universal conversion from a raw score to a scaled score.