<p>^^A old college friend of mine use to tell me the joke about the word assume but I won't bore you with that.
You should look at an actual CDS before making general statement. I did not believe about SAT score is that important but I was just trying to ask her some questions.
No my D has excellent SAT scores, good enough to be competitive, she is now focus on her ECs and that is the point I was trying to make. I believe she could easily retake the SAT I and have 2400 but I have not convinced that would make a difference.</p>
<p>So your daughter could "easily" get a 2400, but she is not going to.
Wow, just when I thought that you couldn't sound any more stupid...</p>
<p>i bet it would make a difference if she had a perfect score on the SATs. in fact it would make a bigger difference than putting more "focus" on ECs when on the apps there are only a couple lines to list the stuff you did in school.</p>
<p>Exactly. And according to this person, their daughter could "easily" do meaning she would lose a Saturday morning and not much more time. There are not many EC's that you can focus on for one Saturday morning, and they are good enough to go on the application. It would be just plain stupid not to retake an SAT if you can easily get a perfect score (unless she has a 2390, but she doesn't). The thing is, a 2400 would make a difference. So would a 2390 or 2350(at least compared to 2250). At the very least, it is a tie breaker.</p>
<p>If you can easily get a perfect score on the SAT, I fail to see how the 4 hours and $40 invested in that are somehow much less valuable than 4 hours and $40 invested in an EC.</p>
<p>Only around 250 students get a 2400 on the SAT each year.
Only around 2,500,000 students invest 4 hours into an EC each year.</p>
<p>Explain to me why you are convinced taking the SAT is not worth it compared to spending time "focusing" 4 hours on an EC</p>
<p>Because she already has >2300, D has 800 on WR and M. The only thing she has to get 800 is on CR(She is strong in reading). Same with SAT II, she had one near 800 but they are both above 700, so there is not much to gain in terms of meeting the bar to be considered for top schools. All her scores make her competitive enough to be considered for top schools for this discussion.</p>
<p>What I mean by retaking the SAT I and try to get the perfect score of 2400, I mean superscoring, she only needs to get 800 on CR and she has 2400, however there is a lot of stress and not enough return for investment. And it's just not 4 hours, you may need time to prep if you want to do well and you will waste your whole Saturday.</p>
<p>NOTE:The 236 people that got 2400 is not the superscorer but first time scorer of 2400.</p>
<p>Some posters in this thread have been rude. It is quite uncalled for.</p>
<p>To the OP, most top private universities and colleges take the ACT/SAT seriously. It is a simple and standardized way to impress future applicants and statistically improve their rankings.</p>
<p>Some top colleges, like Bates, Bowdoin and Colby, don't require the SAT.</p>
<p>Most public universities don't really care that much about the SAT/ACT. That does not mean that a low score on those tests will be tolerated, but generally speaking, a near straight A (3.8+ unweighed GPA) student who takes a significant number of AP classes and gets mostly 5s on AP exams doesn't have to ace the SAT to get into most flagship state universities (like Cal, Michigan, UCLA, UIUC, UNC, UT-Austin, UVa and Wisconsin to name a few). A 2050+ on the SAT/28+ on the ACT generally ought to do it. Some students (primarily URMs and lower income in-staters) get into flagship state schools with even lower standardiazed tests, but the admit rate for applicants with lower SAT/ACT scores is generally quite low.</p>
<p>It she needs lots of prep, then she can't get a 2400 easily.
sounds like quite a bit of work to me</p>
<p>In 2007 there were 340,000 high school students who graduated with a Top 10% ranking at their high school and an impressive GPA, likely in the 3.7-3.8 range. That is a lot of students, in fact far more than the numbers going to the top State Us and top privates, eg, the top 20 USNWR schools (all private) have about 30,000 FT/FY students, the top 20 USNWR LACs have about 10,000 FT/FY students and the top 7 USNWR publics have nearly 30,000 FT/FY students. </p>
<p>Given this, it appears that the top flagship state schools (and to a lesser extent, the top privates) use the class rank/GPA as the STARTING POINT in their analysis. If a student is outside of the top 10%, then he/she sure as heck better have a strong standardized test score (or else some kind of major hook) if they hope to gain acceptance to the most selective State Us. And, if the student is in the Top 10%, then the SAT/ACT becomes a significant differentiating factor within the context of the overall application. Remember, only 60,000 students scored above 1400 on their SAT and 154,000 scored above 1300. Those students typically have qualifying GPA/class ranks and it is the high standardized test score that gets them the highest standing in the applicant pool. </p>
<p>Re the admissions practices of the top State Us vs the top privates, my impression is that the State Us are more dependent on the statistical profile (most heavily influenced by class rank). This is, in large part, driven by the state mandates about enrollment levels for in-state and out-of-state students. For top privates, which don’t have these requirements, there is greater scope for a more holistic approach in the admissions process.</p>
<p>Both are extremely important and it's different at every school so this thread is a tad unimportant. GPA/Class Rank usually get slightly more weight but like it or not, the SAT is the ONLY to compare everybody to each other. There are hundreds of thousands of high schools, but only one test. Also, EVERY point matters when your filling in those bubbles.</p>
<p>
This makes my head hurt.</p>
<p>An alternate (and more plausible) explanation is that students who score highly on standardized tests tend to be more attractive candidates for admission than students who score lower -- they tend to be admitted at a higher rate for reasons other than their test scores.</p>
<p>One of the MIT admissions officers wrote on his blog:</a>
[quote] People make a big deal about test scores. No one seems to believe me when I tell them that when I'm reading an application, I just glance at the test scores to get a sense of them before moving on to the more important parts of the application -- that is, who you are... I don't think I have ever in my summary of a student used high standardized scores as an argument to admit that student.
</p>
<p>Correlation doesn't prove causation, and the higher admit rates of high scorers on the SAT doesn't prove that SAT scores are the major factor for admission into top colleges.</p>