Pennsylvania High School SAT Rankings
For years, the Pennsylvania Department of Education published the average SAT score for every public and charter high school in the state, and the resulting rankings made the rounds in local news every winter. Not surprisingly, many schools in our area sat near the top of the list. If you’ve gone looking for a current version of that list, here’s the short answer: Pennsylvania no longer publishes per-school SAT averages. The early-2020 release was the last one, and even the major rankings sites have followed suit — Niche, for example, has removed SAT and ACT scores from its school rankings entirely.
What’s still published is statewide data. The College Board’s annual Pennsylvania SAT report covers the class of 2025: 63,879 Pennsylvania students — 47% of graduates — took the SAT, with an average total score of 1084. And for comparing schools directly, the state still publishes Keystone Exam and PSSA results by school, which paint much the same picture the old SAT lists did.
What does a school’s ranking mean for your student?
Honestly, the disappearance of the rankings tells you something: your school’s average matters far less than families fear. At the end of the day, it has only a very small impact on college admissions, but there are two things it matters for.
The first is that colleges keep a profile of each high school that includes information such as the school’s size and racial and socioeconomic makeup; the grade point averages and college-admissions exam scores of its senior class; and its grading scale, graduation rate, and what kinds of advanced courses are available. Many schools post this information themselves — Conestoga’s profile is a good example. In general, colleges will look slightly more favorably on candidates who have separated themselves from their peers at their school, but it is only one minor consideration among many. Far more important are the comparison to the national pool of students, GPA, whether a student is taking easy or hard classes, and many other factors. In short: if your student is in a high-scoring district, don’t lose any sleep over this. It’s not going to keep them out of any school.
“Everyone at my school scores higher than me”
That brings us to the second point. Many students who come to us from high-scoring districts arrive with well above average scores, but say they feel “behind” because they hear about peers scoring at the top of the range. We have a consistent message on this: being above average in the national picture is a very good place to be. We are blessed in this area to have many of the top schools in the state, if not the country — the Philadelphia suburban student population is not very representative of the country as a whole.
The current statewide data makes the same point the old rankings did. In the College Board’s class-of-2025 report, students at suburban Pennsylvania schools averaged 1133 — while students at city schools averaged 940, and the statewide average across all test takers was 1084. When the state last published per-school numbers, the median school district in Pennsylvania averaged around 1050, with many districts well below that. A student who feels “middle of the pack” on the Main Line is often comfortably above average in the picture that colleges actually look at: the national one.
What your student can control
At the end of the day, your student can only control how they do on their own test. If they work diligently and acquire the skills the SAT tests, they are going to score great. We often say the SAT can only test things a reasonable high school junior could know, given all the different schools and curricula around the country — and fortunately, we know exactly what those things are. It’s our job to teach each student, in a safe and supportive environment, so they can be proud of whatever they score on test day.