It appears that both the SAT and ACT are offered in the Phillippines. So take a practice test of each exam to see which one you do better on. Then focus your effort on improving the test which was your best one.

The College Board (SAT) and ACT both offer practice tests on their web sites. Use those as your practice test. Most colleges, including the Air Force Academy, don’t care which test you take. You simple want to present your best score on either test.

Absent taking a practice test there isn’t a good way to tell which test might be better for you. Generally, the ACT is based more on what you have learned in school while the SAT is based more on reasoning. However, with the recent changes to the SAT there really isn’t a huge difference anymore.

Here is a link to the Collegeboard site for information about the SAT in the Phillippines.

http://apps.collegeboard.com/cbsearch/center/searchOverseasAdvCenterRegion.jsp?intRegion=7

I hope that helps.

As to the usefullness of the concordance table to students, as long as colleges are using the current concordance tables, I don’t think using a more accurate one would be helpful. Once the ACT or SAT come out with a new table, that table will presumably be adopted by the colleges and then will give students a better handle on trying to compare scores across exams.

You are correct that the concordance table I referenced is from 1995. ACT had indicated in 2004 that they would be coming out with an updated concordance table in Fall 2006 but to my knowledge this is still not out. I suspect that they had hoped to put together a table comparing the new writing sections but the writing sections have been less than generally accepted in the admissions community.

Another problem with the current concordance table is that the SAT re-centered their scores in 1995. This was done because the average SAT score had dropped down close to 400 rather than the 500 which was to have been the average score. To bring the scores back up in line, SAT added points to scores to bring the average back up. Thus a 1994 score of 550 would be completely different in 1996, closer to 625 to 650. The concordance tables are comparing old SAT data and is thus skewed.

I have raised this issue with the College Board and ACT but have had no response.

There are other potential issues but the bottom line is that the concordance tables are “more what you’d call ‘guidelines’ than actual rules” as is was so eloquently put in Pirates of the Caribbean.