<p>I think there’s a fundamental difference between retaking a test to get a better score for yourself, and for your own peace of mind, and retaking a test to get a better score because you feel that’s what’s required to get into MIT. If you’re a perfectionist and you want to retake for your own reasons, that’s fine with me, although I hope that perfectionism is something you’ll grow out of to some degree – it’s incredibly difficult to be a perfectionist and an MIT student, or a perfectionist and a scientist/engineer in general, because when you’re working on things that are really hard, it’s not possible to be perfect. As an MIT student, you have to be able to recognize when something is not worth the effort you’d have to put in to get a perfect score, and you have to be okay with that.</p>
<p>But fundamentally, given that the original score was good enough, I think that the time spent studying for a retake could be much better spent studying something else, if that’s your inclination. The SAT may be nominally academic, but it’s not that difficult a test, and it doesn’t provide much of a challenge to a smart person. So fine, take the SAT a billion times, and get a perfect score – the person with the good enough score who self-studied higher math has still learned more than you.</p>