How many people get perfect SAT scores?
~1,300 per year
Few people got perfect scores on the old SAT; only 5 people in 1984 did, in comparison to 504 people in the 2015. Now that the test is being taken by more people, has no writing section, and is easier, the number of people who score at the top has probably increased.
The exact number, however, isn’t clear: a random website claim it’s .07% of the takers, equivalent to about 1,400 people; Steve Sailer claims the number is above 500, but isn’t exactly sure; Deepseek claims 300-500 get perfect scores; and GPT claims 600-1,000. None of the figures here are too divergent, but it’s clear that they are unofficial guesses. The college board, to my knowledge, has never published anything ont he matter in the last 10 years, though they do post the score→percentile conversions every year.
Beyond the 99th percentile, all scores labelled as 99+. Assuming these are rounded to the nearest percentile, one can make educated guesses of the precise percentiles for the rounded values, assuming equivalent percentile distance between the scores. Using the previous table as a template, I estimated the true percentiles using the rounded percentiles:
Looks very accurate on paper, but the interpolation overestimates the number of perfect scorers by 260.
Using this method, I estimate there to be:
1974 perfect scorers in 2024
1914 perfect scorers in 2023
1448 perfect scorers in 2022
1207 perfect scorers in 2021
1756 perfect scorers in 2020
1554 perfect scorers in 2019
1496 perfect scorers in 2018
772 perfect scorers in 2017
Given the method overestimated the number of perfects in 2015 by 50%, these figures should be considered overestimates. However, I suspect the number of estimated perfect scorers is not as overestimated during the COVID years; the vast majority of people with the potential to get a perfect score on the SAT took it.
Using only the means from the last two years brings me to an estimate of 1300, which is more accurate and up-to date. Shrinking each year estimation by 50% and putting the COVID estimates in line with the other years brings me to these estimates:
2024: 1316
2023: 1276
2022: 1050 (treating this year the same as the others would lead to an estimate of 965)
2021: 950 (treating this year the same as the others would lead to an estimate of 804)
2020: 1170
2019: 1036
2018: 997
2017: 514
Ideally, there would only be one person with a perfect SAT score every year, but I think that 1300 people with a perfect SAT score every year is still pretty good; there are about 60k undergrad students enrolled in ivies every year.
What’s bad is the GRE: about 8% of people get a perfect score on the math section, and if one whiffs a few random questions, one gets docked to the 80th percentile.
Anecdotally it has become relatively frequent. My older son had one (Chinese, female) classmate with a perfect score. He himself missed it by 10 points and with more prepping and second try may have achieved it. My other son actually got 1600. I know several kids who got 800 at the math part.