My daughter is thinking of taking the SAT in her sophomore year and then in junior year. How do colleges take into account 2 or more SAT scores when applying.
If she gets a 1550 the first time and retakes it that may be a negative for top schools. They would see her a a bit obsessed.
Agree with that^
There is nothing wrong with taking it twice though. Colleges won’t bat an eye at two tests, provided she isn’t retaking when she already has a very high score. I personally think three times is the max anyone should take the test.
@TomSrOfBoston - Do we know that is true? If so, how do we know it? I think there is a lot of commentary here about test scores that is just parents speculating. I don’t think most schools care about how many times you take your standardized tests, even if they require all score.
@Proudpatriot Since this is the Parent’s Forum, you will get parents speculating based on what we have learned. There is no Adcoms Forum.
What I am trying to say is that the idea that schools care about how many times you take your standardized tests has not been proven to be true. I personally think that the vast majority of schools don’t care if you take the ACT/SAT every single sitting for all 4 years of high school. I know that goes against the standard parent line here at CC but I just don’t see anything that indicates that the vast majority of schools care how many times you take the ACT/SAT as long as you wind up with high test scores.
That said, I think most kids have better things to do with their time than to endlessly prepare for standardized tests. If I were the OP I would have my child wait until junior year to start standardized testing. If she takes the PSAT in October of her Jr. year and spends time preparing she should take both the SAT and ACT in Nov/Dec (whenever the next sittings are) because she will already be prepared for the PSAT. After you get her scores back she can retake later in her Jr. year or early Sr. year if necessary.
Isn’t there something called super scoring where colleges take the highest scores of all the relevant sections of SAT when applying…
Some schools ‘super score’ the SAT so they are expecting students to take it multiple times.
Do you know which schools?
I’ll speculate that highly selective schools probably do care how many times you take it when trying to decide between such high caliber prospects but as mentioned the vast majority most likely don’t care. They just want the highest scores to make their admission stats look good. They report the average test scores but I don’t believe they ever report the average number of times their students took the tests.
@MKurianMathew Here’s a list from the College Board
https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/professionals/sat-score-use-practices-participating-institutions.pdf
The very tippy top tier colleges know that excessive SAT/ACT/SAT2 tests are the purview of higher SES kids – thus of diminishing value. Former Yale admissions dean Jeff Brenzel:
“With respect to programs of study, we are less concerned with particular course designations and more concerned simply to see that candidates have embraced and performed well in whatever their schools offer as a most challenging program. At the same time, we are not particularly drawn to one-dimensional students who have made their sole or primary objective in life amassing the largest number of honors or AP courses conceivable, accompanied by multiple efforts to achieve the world’s highest test scores.”
That’s why some schools require full testing histories – to discourage the excessive test taking.
That being said, 2-3 aren’t excessive. IMHO, 4+ is excessive.
A lot of schools allow for super-scoring, but you get to select which tests to send. If you send two good scores, the school doesn’t know if you took it three additional times.
But some selective schools (which may or may not super score) separately require you to report the scores of ALL tests that you’ve taken. If you take it five times, you are required to send all five scores.
There’s a variety of reasons for that policy, one of which is to provide a more level playing field for kids who don’t have the resources for extensive prepping and multiple test taking.
Cornell, Rice, Stanford, Penn, Yale, UCB, UCLA, Georgetown, Tufts. There are others.
For a soph, just rely on the PSAT and Plan/PACT. Come junior year, have the kid take a practice SAT and a practice ACT too. Some kids do better on SAT, others do better on ACT, and the schools will take either.
Kids generally do better on these tests as they get older – their teenager brains grow and they learn more at school. They also usualy do a little better on the second or third try. So most kids will get their best scores in the fall of senior year or the spring of junior year. Any actual score you get earlier than that is unlikely to get used. So just do practice tests or the P- tests.
How do I know? Because I’ve heard admissions officers answer this question at college nights at our high school. Every year. The answer generally is something like this, “We don’t think twice about students taking it a couple of times and if you feel your score doesn’t reflect your abilities of course you should take it again. If you take it four or five times we MIGHT (and I emphasize they always say MIGHT) wonder why you don’t have better things to do with your Saturday mornings.”
Since schools generally report superscored results to the various groups ranking colleges it’s in their interests for students to have high scores.
“If you take it four or five times we MIGHT (and I emphasize they always say MIGHT) wonder why you don’t have better things to do with your Saturday mornings.”
Much of this discussion is missing the point.
There’s only three sections on the SAT. So to super-score, the max potential number of tests you’d ever send is three. Unless the school is Cornell/Rice/Stanford/Penn etc. you would never send four or more scores in.
Schools that super-score are used to seeing kids submit two or three test results. No big deal. And they never know if you took it five times, unless you apply to Cornell/Rice/Stanford/Penn etc.
Most schools do not super-score the ACT. So if you are an ACT kid, you only send one score report in unless you are applying to Cornell/Rice/Stanford/Penn etc.
So the question is whether you know whether your soph kid might want to apply to Cornell/Rice/Stanford/Penn etc. And the answer is likely that you have no idea.
I don’t believe Penn requires all testing - perhaps it’s a recent change in policy.
I don’t think there’s a negative. It depends on the school whether they want all your scores, your best scores in one sitting or your superscore (which means you send all the scores and they take the best reading and best math and add them together)
“I don’t believe Penn requires all testing - perhaps it’s a recent change in policy.”
Within the past few months, Penn softened their policy a bit. Officially, they now “encourage” applicants to send their full testing history.
For 2015 and prior, they had a very strict policy that you had to send everything. They said one reason they backed off the stricter policy was that they weren’t able to know for sure if applicants were complying. No way for Penn to audit whether someone sending two SAT scores actually took it more than that.
A cynical view of supercoring is that it allows the colleges to report higher ACT/SAT scores to the USNWR rankings.
^^ Pretty sure it’s not a cynical view but more of an accurate view.