and find out exactly where you went wrong.
And on the math test (not the English test) so many people get a perfect score, that getting one wrong answer can cause a giant drop in your score. Again this depends on the cohort you took the test with because it's graded on a CURVE. If many people get 100%, they'll all be at the top percentile in the scoring -- but the people with one wrong will be significantly lower.
The top colleges know this and they consider applications accordingly. When a winner of an Intel Scholarship for a physics project, for example, "only" gets a 720, they know he's just as smart as the kid with 800. A few slip-ups in the math test are meaningless, really. The best math students aren't always the best proof-readers of their own work. That Intel winner could be far ahead of an 800 scorer conceptually -- doing far more advanced math on an everyday basis. But he could still make a couple of "dumb mistakes" on the simpler math that is covered on the SAT2.
(Also, one way the top schools keep their scores as high as they do is because most of the colleges use the highest score ever achieved for each subject level. They recognize that there are students who scored higher in one sitting on math, and on a different sitting in English. So my daughter was counted as an 800 in math even though her senior year score was quite a bit lower. They used her junior year score for math and her senior score for English.)
https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2018/07/12/surprisingly-low-scores-mathematics-sat-stun-and-anger-students
The problem, in short, is that the SAT is scored on a curve. If the mathematics exam is unusually easy, students will on average get more questions correct than in a typical SAT administration. But the College Board then compensates with a curve, and missing a relatively small number of questions can result in a much lower score than would typically be the case.
SNIP
"That is a problem for those colleges who treat a 650, a 700, a 750, and an 800 as accurate indicators of real differences in Math ability," the Princeton Review said. "It is a problem, too, for high-scoring students who make the occasional careless error or who misbubble on questions that they are quite capable of answering. With a typical curve, there’s some cushion to mitigate the impact of such errors. There was no cushion on the June 2018 SAT."
As for why this matters, the analysis said, "It might be fair to say that the most accomplished students shouldn’t make those kinds of errors, but is that true? Wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the most accomplished test takers don’t make those kinds of errors. Small mistakes under time pressure can make a big difference in life, no doubt, but doing well in college tends to be about doing well over time with the possibility to revise, rethink, and do better."
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