I just received my son's PSAT 8/9 results (taken in 8th grade) and am curious how other people's children did on it as compared to an SAT taken in 7th grade (as part of Duke TIP or another talent search).

My child's score went from a 690 math on the SAT to a perfect score (720) on the PSAT 8/9. His reading/writing score however decreased from a 590 on the SAT to a 530 on the PSAT 8/9. He had told me that the math was much easier, but that the reading/writing was about the same difficulty. His percent correct on the PSAT 8/9 reading/writing was a little better than on the SAT but the score was lower because of how the test is scaled.

College board says that the scores on the PSAT 8/9 are supposed to be similar to what one would score on the PSAT or SAT taken at the same time and I'm curious if that is actually true. I haven't found any data online to support or negate this claim. I'm not concerned about his scores, but I am very curious about all of these different tests that they put out (PSAT 8/9, PSAT, SAT, SAT subject tests, AP tests). It seems like a bit of a racket.

I suspect that is true for students scoring in the average range. For students scoring at the top of the range, the higher ceiling of the SAT is going to allow them (potentially) to get a better score while still making some errors. This is how it played out for my son, who seems to have a constant error rate no matter how hard the test is.

Yeah, they take a lot of points off on the psat 8/9 just for missing one question, especially on the math. Looking at last year's scale as this years is not available, zero wrong was 720, one wrong was 660. My kid just had a good day on the math where he didn't make any careless errors. Plus the SAT had math that he had never encountered. It's hard to get a trig question correct if you haven't learned trig yet. I think most of what he missed was actual lack of knowledge, not careless errors.