<p>Aim schools: UPenn (Wharton?), Berkeley, various Ivys
GPA: 4.0 unweighted
Grade: Junior
Mainly thinking about retaking because my friends are to achieve the "safe" score of 2350.</p>
<p>Since I have signed up for the next test already, should I take it to try to improve my superscore, take it and cancel on site if I feel it was bad, or not take at all?</p>
<p>I wouldn’t bother if I were you. Maybe retake an SAT II test instead if you didn’t do perfectly on one of those. Most schools don’t value the writing section too much anyways.</p>
<p>This score is perfect
no need to improve perfection
also would you mind sharing a few tips on how you studied?
like where did you learn the vocabulary from?
and what books would you recommend?and how many past papers did you solve</p>
<p>i went to Elite (an SAT boot camp over the summer) and they gave me 2 boxes of 1 thousand vocab flash cards. i also made my own hundreds of flash cards (every time you see a word you don’t know on a test, in a review book, MAKE A CARD FOR IT). </p>
<p>my memorization worked like this: every day for the first few weeks, i would memorize 25+ (depending on how difficult you thought it was) COMPLETELY NEW words. don’t bother w/ ones you already know. then after these weeks, every night/other night, i would sit down for an hour and just review ALL of them. set aside cards you had difficulty with, and do em again. </p>
<p>IT ALL PAID OFF. you will find passages SOOOO much easier to understand because you know the difficult words in there. </p>
<p>math- practice, practice, practice until you know all the tricks they throw in.
writing MC- practice, practice, practice
essay: i consistently wrote essays with scores of 10+ (teachers scored), but i got unlucky with the prompt on the real SAT. have a bank of examples (i had 6- 3 books, 3 real life) and practice essays, at least 3 a week. </p>
<p>as for books, i don’t recommend any specific ones. i used standard school books, like scarlet letter, etc. it worked. pick ANY you like</p>
<p>Memorizing 2000 words is ineffective in my opinion. I memorized 400-500 of the most common SAT words and scored a perfect on my CR and a 2350 overall.</p>
<p>Spend your time practicing doing the passages, the sentence completions are doable even without memorizing a ton of vocab words</p>
<p>Normally I would say no, but considering that the writing section is the most knowledge based section on the test, you could pick up a copy of Optimal English Grammar and get an 800 on the writing section, and then have a 2400 superscore.</p>
<p>Hey, I got the same score on the May SAT, and it was my first try. I had the same breakdown, except I had a 10 on the essay. I wanted to retake it, but when I looked at the detailed report it told me I only had 3 incorrect answers on the whole test, and they were in writing. I don’t know why you needed to attend classes for the SAT though. I just did 3 or 4 practice tests, and the vocab itself is not hard enough to merit memorization.</p>
<p>I received a 2300 on the May 2013 SAT. 800 in math, 760 in reading, and 740 in writing. 2320 is an excellent score, and I don’t really see any point in retaking it. At that level, there’s a huge chance that your score might drop (unless you care only about superscoring). Definitely focus on writing. Colleges like to see individual scores that are kind of near each other. The fact that you got perfects in reading and math but a noticeable 720 in writing might tell colleges something that you might not want them to know about (grammar is not as good as math and comprehension?) I would definitely retake to get that writing score up there. REmeber though, perfect mutliple choice in wriitng and a 9 on the essay still equals an 800!</p>
<p>I was in the same position (high score but still want to retake) and got my score up from a 2380 to a 2400! You could easily do the same! I would try again. Cancel if you really felt bad about it but you won’t if you have scores like that!</p>
I got a modest 2000, but with 12 on essay ;)</p>