SAT Score Averages for every New Jersey High School (Data Inside)
Previously - Our Massachusetts blog post on SAT scores by high school was very popular and read among parents in our home state. So, we’ll continue the discussion on this topic with New Jersey.
In this data driven blog post, we’re going to share the data collected from the New Jersey High School Performance Data from their spotlight news media outlet to understand the SAT averages of specific High Schools in New Jersey. You can view the data tables on their website if you would like. We’ll share our thoughts on these high school averages and how you can use them to guide your college admission strategy.
At Tigerway, our subjective house view is that standardized testing is also compared locally at the city and school-level. While admission offices may not confirm this, we think that a student’s scores are judged relative to their peers at their own high school or compared to peers with similar demographics, background, and academic environment.
As a basic example, if a student goes to the high school Bergan County Academies in New Jersey, you can see in the table below that the English average is 710 and the Math average is a 757 for a total of 1467. We have a meaningful number of New Jersey students from Bergan County and it’s fair to say that in some of the High Schools there, it’s definitely about outperforming the county or the school average. This is because even if everyone has a 1400 SAT score at a high school, not all of the graduating class can get admitted into the Top 20 schools. There are quotas and allocation percentages that factor into each school.
Over the past several years, we’ve observed with concrete data that Bergan County students need to typically score above a 1400+ on the SAT to stay competitive in the application process compared to peer students from their county.
At the same time, we found that students who score at the average (or below average) at their High Schools have a relatively more challenging time during college admissions for competitive schools even if their score is within the median of the incoming class.
What this implies about the process is the following:
Similar to our data from our home state Massachusetts, we again think that colleges will check the averages of SAT scores at high schools when evaluating your standardized testing performance. As a result, while most parents and students focus on a College’s median scores and percentiles for scores of admitted students, we also think understanding your score relative to your current high school is also a valuable factor.
If your standardized test scores are much higher than your school’s average, and in this case it’s around 1400+ in Bergan County’s most academically accomplished schools, your score has special meaning in the context of college admissions.
Now If your SAT scores are higher than your school’s average AND your high school is underrepresented at the college you’re applying to, that is an added bonus to your application because now you represent “diversity” in the eyes of admission officers. So for instance if you attend a school in Ocean County, and you have a 1400 SAT Score, that is special because the average SAT score in that county is closer to 1100-1150.
We think SAT scores are compared at the school level, your state, then the regional level (e.g. Northeast vs. South vs. West coast), and finally the national level. It makes most sense for admission officers to view the context of a score relative to the environment that score comes from. High scores from diversity applicants can have a serious positive boost to college applications.
The takeaway here is that you now have one more data point to view the context of your standardized test scores and whether you should submit them in today’s test optional environment.
The first goal of your SAT preparation process is to outperform the average at your school from the tables shown below. If you have among the highest set of scores from your academic class in your year, even if your scores fall slightly short of the typical admitted students’ score ranges, our Program thinks that your odds of being the preferred candidate from your high school is elevated.
New Jersey SAT Averages by High School (Data Table)
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Calvin Cheung, Director (617-749-8421, text today to book a call)
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