In the USA nearly all colleges require that you take the SAT exams and submit the scores as part of your application. The SAT has three parts, each part has a maximum score of 800 so the maximum total score would be 2400. But many schools only count two parts of the SAT, so their maximum would be 1600. At elite schools like the Ivy League, Duke, Stanford, UChicago, MIT, etc the average student scores between 1400 to 1600 on the two parts. Most universities have a page on their website where they post the average scores for SATs for their incoming Freshman class. That gives you a quick way to compare your own academic level to the level of students at that school.

No elite school that I know of uses the SAT as the main criterion for admission. The most important item in the application is always the GPA. What was your average grade in all the courses you took during high school? Students at the elite colleges normally took the hardest courses in their schools and scored the highest possible grade in almost every class. A typical student at Harvard, Dartmouth, Duke, etc would have ranked among the top 2 or 3 students in his high school of 300 – 400 students.

GPAs (Grade Point Averages) are sometimes calculated on a scale of 0 to 100 and sometimes on a 1,2,3,4 scale. Usually a 4 means that the student got A in every class. But, if a student takes classes that are advanced or honors classes, harder than the usual classes, then they get a bonus, so they might have a GPA higher than 4. That is routine for students at elite schools.

The SAT counts for about 50% of your college admissions. Don’t worry, I also had problems with the SAT and didn’t score well at first. I recommend studying with the GuideParadise SAT guide – http://www.guideparadise.com
Using it I improved my score by 460 points from 1700 to 2160!