Understanding SAT and ACT score equivalency?

I've taken both the SAT and the ACT and I've noticed that the scoring is different for both tests. Can someone explain how to understand the score equivalency between these tests? Is there any chart or tool that can help me with this conversion?

Understanding SAT and ACT score equivalency is all about how the two tests are scaled. While there isn't a precise 1-to-1 correspondence, there are ways to estimate equivalency between the two.

The SAT is scored on a 400-1600 scale, whereas the ACT is scored on a 1-36 scale. To make sense of your scores, you can use an SAT/ACT concordance table. This table matches corresponding SAT and ACT scores based on percentiles. For instance, on the ACT, a composite score of 30 corresponds roughly to a total score of 1390 on the SAT, both of which fall around the 90th percentile.

For a rough estimation, you can divide your SAT score by 10 to get an ACT equivalent. So, an SAT score of 1440 would be roughly equivalent to an ACT score of 29. However, this method is not as precise, and the concordance table should be favored for accurate conversion.

It's also essential to remember that colleges generally don't prefer one test over the other. So, it's up to you to decide which test best reflects your skills and abilities. If your SAT and ACT scores are roughly equivalent after concordance, and you're applying to schools where both scores are in range for the college's accepted student profile, you can choose to submit either or both scores. If one score is significantly higher in the percentile ranks, that would be the score to submit.

In terms of resources, you can easily find a concordance table online by searching "SAT ACT concordance table." Unfortunately, because the scores are based on percentiles from the two testing organizations' data, there isn't a specific tool to do the conversion automatically.