What's a good score?
What’s a good score
A good score is any score higher than the score you got last week.
Anyone who tells you otherwise doesn’t know what they’re talking about.
What’s an impressive score
The best answer is: Who cares? We’re not doing this to impress anyone. So quit worrying about it.
But since we’re talking about it, I’ll let you in on a secret: an impressive score on the AMC 8 is much lower than most people realize.
After all, most people who take the AMC 8 are used to scoring all the problems right on most tests, so they expect that you need to get 25 out of 25 in order to have an impressive score. But that’s actually crazy – almost no one does this.
Here’s a fun quiz: out of 100 people who take the AMC 8, how many do you think get 20 out of 25 right? In other words, 80% right, which is a B- in many classrooms. So how many?
Well, in 2023, 98% of the people taking the AMC 8 did not get that many right; they got 19 or fewer. Only 2% got 20 or more right.
Surprised? Just wait: only half the people answered 10 or more right out of 25. If you got 10 right, you were in the top half. And remember, this is not just the top half of students in general. This is the top half of students who took the AMC 8. They all thought they were going to do great!
…and in fact, many of them did do great, but they didn’t realize it. Which is a little sad, right?
What it all means for you
There are three things I’m trying to get you to see here:
- These questions can be hard. You have to be patient when you’re working on them.
- These questions can be tricky. You have to **be careful **when you’re working on them.
- Your score can be very misleading. You have to set aside all your normal expectations, except that you want the number to go up over time.
Oh, also this: if you do all these things, you will earn an impressive score. You just won’t realize how impressive it is while you’re in the middle of it, because you are not used to a test whose score works like this. So like I said at the beginning, quit worrying about it.