Is a perfect ACT or SAT better?

A perfect ACT score of 36 and a perfect SAT score of 1600 are viewed as equally impressive by colleges, since admissions offices use concordance tables to treat them as equivalent benchmarks of academic excellence. Neither test gives an applicant an advantage over the other; what matters most is choosing the exam that aligns with a student’s strengths, whether that means the ACT’s faster pace and broader content coverage or the SAT’s emphasis on reasoning and problem-solving. In practice, both scores place a student at the very top of the applicant pool, and the difference between them is negligible compared to other factors like GPA, extracurricular achievements, essays, and recommendations.