It’s really hard to simulate the testing environment when taking a practice test, so scores from them aren’t always good predictors—sometimes you do better and sometimes you do worse. Personally, I could never concentrate long enough to take a practice test all the way through—the real SAT is one thing, but to voluntarily sit down at home and do it is beyond my self discipline, lol—and so my mind would wander, I would get distracted, and if I ever did score it my score was lower than it should be. Other people do a lot better on practice tests than the real thing, usually because anxiety interferes on the real thing (for example, the timer doesn’t /really/ matter when you do it at home, but it sure does on the real thing—so you start thinking about the timer while you’re doing the real thing more than you do at home, and the more you think about it the more pressed you feel, and the more pressed you feel the worse you do).

Have you taken the official PSAT? It tends to be a better indicator, and although it is made to be a little easier than the SAT, when they give you a predicted SAT score on your PSAT score report it takes that into account.

Another explanation might be that you’re thinking too hard, lol. You might, believe it or not, be studying TOO hard—if you study /too/ much, then you just make yourself worry about it more, and it is true that you do WORSE when you’re anxious about it. Further, if you get /too/ in to the “test-taking strategies” given in prep courses and books, then you start thinking more about the strategies than the questions—you can talk yourself out of and away from the RIGHT answers if you’re concentrating more on what you’ve been told about solving problems than on the problems themselves.

The biggest question is: have you taken the real thing or just practice tests? You can’t really know how you’re going to do until you do it. A big part of doing well on the SAT is KNOWING the test, and nothing can tell you about it—from the time limit to the content to what you need to work on—like the real thing can. I don’t know what grade you’re going into, but take the real thing once as soon as you can (October) and just see how it goes. Even if you’re a senior this year, you can always take it again in November or even December if you’re not satisfied with your scores. If you aren’t a senior, I would still suggest you take it early– and just don’t take it as seriously: relax, because you have plenty of time and since only your top score matters, it really is just good practice and can’t hurt you at all.

Good luck!

1) Lack of Focus because of something that happened recently / uncomfortable environment (like too much noise etc.)

2) Those 2 SAT exams came from different books. Therefore, this leads to different difficultly levels of the exam.

3) Made a lot of careless mistakes.

4) You may have taken the very same test before in the one that you scored higher before.

5) Did slightly better on the subjects because it had most of what you liked/ good in. (Such as the essay topic etc…)

Just some reasons that you might want to consider. 🙂 There’s probably more that I didn’t mention about.