SEC East vs SEC West

Everyone knows the SEC West kicks football ass this year and, until the Georgia-Arkansas game, it owned a clean slate over the SEC East. (Go Dawgs). Yeah yeah, so much for football. But what about SAT scores?

I used the data from this site to do a comparison. I dumped it into an Excel file, sorted by schools in the East and West. These are the lower numbers, the average that students in the lower regions of admission scored, the 25th percentile. As you can see from the site, just eyeballing the data, the East schools seem to do better. If you sort the teams by region and average the scores, you get:

West: 500 Reading and 519 Math
East: 557 Reading and 569 Math

An advantage, for you math non-majors out there, of 57 points for the East in Reading, and 50 points in math. The differences are a bit less stark if we look at the 75th percentile, but they still favor the East by 43 points in Reading and 40 points in Math.

"But wait," you might say. "That's not fair. Vandy is in the East. They can actually read and write there."

Good point. So I excluded Vanderbilt and there's still an East advantage. Without Vandy, the East outscores the West on the 25th percentile Reading by 35 points and the 25th percentile Math by 26 points. At the 75th percentile level, the advantage to the East is 25 points for Reading, 21 points for Math.

So maybe the West is kicking ass in football this year, but it only takes a friggin 470 in Reading to be in the 25th percentile at Mississippi State, those other Bulldogs. The 25th percentile table is below.

Team	Reading 25%	Reading 75%
Alabama	500	620
Arkansas	500	610
Auburn	530	630
LSU	500	610
Ole Miss	480	600
Texas A&M	520	640
Mississippi State	470	610
Average West	500	617
Florida	580	670
Georgia	560	650
Kentucky	490	610
Missouri	510	640
South Carolina	540	640
Tennessee	530	640
Vanderbilt	690	770
Average East	557	660
East vs West Diff	57	43
East Minus Vandy	535	642
Minus Vandy Diff	35	25