Leaderboards & seasons
How ranking, percentiles and tiers work.
Where you stand against everyone else preparing for this test date — a live cohort, not a static score report.
Where this actually stands
Live. Rankings only count attempts sat under consistent conditions — we would rather have a small honest leaderboard than a large meaningless one.
A leaderboard that shows raw position tells you something different every week depending on how many people happen to be using the platform. Being 40th is meaningless without knowing whether there are 50 people or 50,000.
So the board reports percentile, and the six skill tiers are set from percentile too rather than from a raw score. A tier that means "top 10% of people preparing" means the same thing at any cohort size; a tier that means "above 1350" quietly gets easier or harder as the population shifts.
Seasons reset the board, so a strong result in October does not sit at the top for a year and nobody joining in March is competing against a snapshot of a different cohort.
Extended-time attempts are ranked in their own pool. Comparing a fifty-percent-extra-time sitting against a standard one would be unfair in both directions, and merging them would make the whole board mean less.
Ranking is opt-out at any time, from settings, and you keep everything else including your own percentile — the diagnostic value of knowing where you stand does not depend on anyone else being able to see it.
Accounts declared as under 18 are kept off the public board by default, and that cannot be switched back on from the settings page. The signup form says so next to the checkbox, and it is enforced on the row itself rather than in the one screen that writes it, because a guarantee that depends on every future caller remembering it is not a guarantee.
It compares you against other people practising here. That is not a national sample, and it should not be read as one: people who seek out practice platforms are, on average, preparing harder than the general test-taking population.
It is useful for a specific question — is this score normal for someone at this stage of preparation — and it is not useful for the question people want to ask it, which is where they would rank nationally. For that, use the published percentiles from the College Board and the middle-50% range of the schools you are applying to.
Each part is useful alone. Together they are the point.
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