Most people spend the majority of their test prep time attempting to master content. This is a good thing! Without content knowledge, you’re in trouble. However, if you want to set yourself up for success, you should also be devoting some time to learning the rules of the game—you can’t develop effective strategy until you know the rules! One of the most important rules of any game is how the scoring works.

Below is a summary of the math scoring tables from the 8 official practice tests, which are a pretty good representative sample. You can see the highest, lowest, and “probable” (average over the 8 tests, rounded to the nearest 10) scaled score each raw score receives on the Official 8.

There are a few good use cases for this. First, you may know that you need to hit a certain score in order to qualify for something (a scholarship, a summer studies program, etc.). Knowing how many you need to get right to get there can help you strategize about which topics to focus on and which to ignore.

I expect people will also use this to speculate about how they might have done after tests (e.g., “I’m pretty sure I only got 5 wrong and I answered everything else—what might my score be?”).