<p>I am stunned that I did so well in Science, so it is unlikely that I'll be able to raise my composite score… </p>
<p>Most colleges don't superscore the ACT. </p>
<p>Let's say I retest and I do better in Math, raising it to a 32 or 33, but everything else decreases by a point. Would that do more damage than good? What are the risks of retesting and doing more poorly the second time? Should I just leave my score? How bad is my unbalanced score?</p>
<p>There’s nothing wrong with taking the ACT again. Most colleges will just take the higher composite score that you give them, so even if you do worse, they’ll take your first score to factor into your application. Take it again if you want to. In regards to the Ivy League portion, a 33 composite is good enough to get you looked at by the Ivies. The way I view Ivy admission is that the ACT is basically just the first checkpoint. Although they won’t explicitly say it, most of the Ivies have a soft minimum of ACT score. So if you hit that criteria, they can go into the rest of your application and determine if you’re someone they want at your school. If I were you, though, I would take those hours that you’d spend studying for the ACT and taking the actual test and do something that gives back to your community or along those lines that you can put on an application. That will garner a lot more attention from the Ivies than a one point increase on the ACT.</p>
<p>The costs to taking the test again include: (1) test registration fees and (2) time spent studying for the retest. You must consider whether your time would be better spent doing other academic or extracurricular pursuits.</p>
<p>That being said, you shouldn’t let the possibility of a lower score be the lone reason for not retaking the ACT. College admissions committees simply don’t have the time/inclination to sort through the hundreds of thousands of test scores to distinguish a one-sitting “33” from a two- or three-sitting “33.” If they did devote time/effort to making such evaluations, they would be making the statement that standardized test scores are far more important than most admissions officers claim. Think about that…</p>