how competivitive are my sat scores?

Colleges & Universities A-Z Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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<p>“Back to the OP’s original question: Your SAT scores will gain you consideration and no – your application won’t be set aside or tossed in the trash heap simply because your critical reading score places you in the top 3 % of applicants, rather than the top 1%. RELAX.”</p>

<p>Here is the data from MIT’s blog:
[MIT</a> Admissions | Blog Entry: “MIT Admissions Statistics 2007”](<a href=“http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/admissions_statistics/mit_admissions_statistics_2007.shtml]MIT”>http://www.mitadmissions.org/topics/apply/admissions_statistics/mit_admissions_statistics_2007.shtml)
Middle 50% score range of admitted students:
SAT Reasoning Test - Critical Reading [670, 770]
SAT Reasoning Test - Math [720, 800]
SAT Reasoning Test - Writing [670, 760]
ACT Composite [31, 34]
SAT Subject Test - Math [730, 800]
SAT Subject Test - Science [700, 800]</p>

<p>As you can see, the 660 falls in the lowest 25% of admitted students. Nevertheless, they were admitted. Your SAT scores won’t matter nearly as much as your extracurricular activities and grades.</p>

<p>By the way, hi Le Zhong</p>

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<p>For 690, I’d say it’s low for MIT. I go to a top prep school and many of my friends here would retake the test for a higher score.</p>

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<p>My SAT scores:
Writing: 800
Verbal: 7something
Math: 700</p>

<p>Oh noes! How will I ever get in with ONLY a 700 on the MATH SECTION?</p>

<p>Just sayin.</p>

<p>P.S. I realize I’m being obnoxious at this point, but I’m in a grouchy mood from all of my work. =)</p>

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<p>I don’t think that you should belittle people who worry about their SAT scores.</p>

<p>It’s a legitimate concern and a concrete area for improvement in an often murky world of college admissions.</p>

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<p>My scores (I am an MIT’11)</p>

<p>Math: 780
Reading: 680
Writing: 580</p>

<p>Math II: 800
Biology: 580</p>

<p>Taken for Princeton…
US History: 710</p>

<p>As you can see, SAT scores aren’t that important.</p>

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<p>@LauraN: </p>

<p>Well honestly, the thing that is wrong with our educational system are people who try to encourage students by telling them how “good” they are doing, and then discouraging those students who are “perfectionists” from being perfectionist. What’s wrong with someone who feels that a 690 or such is inadequate? More power to them - I think you should be jealous of someone who has the drive and the mindset for that, someone who doesn’t care that an 86% is an 86% when they feel that they should be doing better, or that they need to do better. That’s the reason our public school systems are so massively behind, while we have some of the best universities in the world. Those people who say an 86% is good enough aren’t the ones who end up being the people who DON’T realise that the people who strive for 100% are the ones making the private universities, the private high schools with higher standards. They’re not there to make everyone feel good; they’re there to have their students learn, regardless. A student that feels that an 86% is good enough will always remain mediocre compared to those people who endeavour to surpass that.</p>

<p>Even if your rationale is that it’s just a test score, that means nothing. This crap about people with “bad test days” is just plain stupid. Is that what you’re going to tell your boss when you fail to complete a task correctly? “I’m having a bad day” or “I just couldn’t remember how to do it right - I could get it right the next time.” ?? Absolutely not. A test score is a means a of self-evaluation, and those people trying to get 800s are trying to gauge their improvement until they reach the maximum measured skill level. Honestly, colleges probably should focus much more on objective measurements such as SAT or ACT scores simply because skills are objective - colleges and universities are there for people to learn, not to judge your character as a person. Your potential for success can only be judged by your concrete accomplishments, be those test scores or a high-profile event that was planned and executed. </p>

<p>Summarised, you shouldn’t criticise people for nitpicking at their college applications. They’re trying to be the best, and they want colleges to see that as well, as they so often fail to do. If more students acted as such, maybe we wouldn’t have just the Ivy League and a handful of top technical universities… maybe ALL universities would have standards raised to the point where high schools would have to raise their standards to where the US could become internationally competitive in education again.</p>

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<p>Oh please, I’ve had enough of this nonsense. All I said was that I think it’s a crying shame that students in our country put so much emphasis on ONE test, as if it will make or break the rest of their lives, and in the process give up things they really enjoy and miss out on being a KID. It’s indicative of a HUGE problem in our society and college admissions process, and I stand by what I said. But if you want to turn around and scapegoat me, and say that I’M the problem with our nation’s entire education system because I dared to suggest that people lead more healthy, balanced lives, well you go right ahead.</p>

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<p>The fact that you stereotype those who attempt to get those scores as having unhealthy, unbalanced lives shows your ignorance of students of this calibre. How you can even attempt to assume that the pursuit of intelligent and independent learning eclipses a natural lifestyle is beyond me; perhaps you haven’t had the experience yourself, so you immediately attack the actions of those people who can and do. </p>

<p>[EDIT]: Although I do now notice that you are a senior blogger at MIT. Which I should have noticed earlier, since I read those blogs. After such, you can’t say that because a person is spending more time studying for the SAT or whatnot, they drop all of those things that they love. I cannot agree that it is necessarily a problem at all. I think you might find that there are quite a number of people of either type at MIT, and you should as a mature member of the university at the least accept those people who were like that, and accept those students who ARE like that.</p>

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<p>I’ve grown up in an exam-focused country, where students take three centralised exams (after 6th grade, 10th grade, and 12th grade) I definitely agree with the utility of such exams to compare across a broad swathe of pupils. </p>

<p>So, LauraN, I kind of disagree with your decrying of the OP’s feeling that the 690 is bad. Because it just plain isn’t very good, and the OP didn’t master the subject. He wasn’t as good as the other people who got 750, 770, etc. </p>

<p>It wasn’t missing a question because of wrong shading, or feeling sick. The raw score needed to get an 700 is 60 [out of 80], which means the maximum number of correct questions is 64. Missing 16 questions…</p>

<p>But since the OP has taken so many other subjects, and MIT only considers the two top scores, then it doesn’t matter.</p>

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<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>

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<p>Another take on this - plenty of kids with 800/800 (the writing portion is still not judged that seriously at MIT, at least according to the last comments published on this topic by Stu Schmill) get rejected at MIT and Ivy League schools every year. I think that over 3000 students achieved this score set last year, and yet Harvard admitted a very small number of these students. A student who has pursued outside interests for years (music, sports, a hobby, etc.) with sub-perfect scores (and who will add to campus life) is more attractive to adcoms. If your scores are competitive (at MIT, that means about 700 and above), don’t retake tests, you’ll just seem obsessive, with misplaced priorities.</p>

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<p>I direct my comments towards your own edit. My “ignorance” of students of high caliber? Gee, thanks. My knowledge of students of high caliber COMES from being an admissions blogger and getting comments and emails from them on a daily basis, and from going to a competitive magnet school full of such students. (Maybe I was one of them, maybe not.)</p>

<p>I’m not saying that “the pursuit of intelligent and independent learning eclipses a natural lifestyle,” I’m saying that obsessively studying for one exam and obsessing over one B- on your transcript eclipses a natural lifestyle.</p>

<p>“After such, you can’t say that because a person is spending more time studying for the SAT or whatnot, they drop all of those things that they love. I cannot agree that it is necessarily a problem at all.”
We can agree to disagree on this point. It most certainly happens, and I have seen it, precisely because of the “experience” of high learning that you assumed I did not have (an assumption you made for no reason other to make a rather nasty and insulting point which would have had no basis in fact or logic, even if it were true).</p>

<p>“I think you might find that there are quite a number of people of either type at MIT, and you should as a mature member of the university at the least accept those people who were like that, and accept those students who ARE like that.”</p>

<p>What Mollie said. There AREN’T people like that. People like that cannot handle MIT without changing their attitudes, at least to some degree. People like that are not admitted to MIT when the admissions officers find an unhealthy degree of perfectionism. They know that those students are going to fall apart once they fail an exam (which they almost certainly will do at some point) and they’d rather give the spot to someone who has an equally competitive SAT score but has shown (through essays, recommendations, etc, not the possibly lower score per se) that they can handle failure.</p>

<p>Also, I’d just like to make one more point that you make a pretty big jump when you say that studying for the SAT is learning.</p>

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<p>“What Mollie said. There AREN’T people like that. People like that cannot handle MIT without changing their attitudes, at least to some degree. People like that are not admitted to MIT when the admissions officers find an unhealthy degree of perfectionism. They know that those students are going to fall apart once they fail an exam (which they almost certainly will do at some point) and they’d rather give the spot to someone who has an equally competitive SAT score but has shown (through essays, recommendations, etc, not the possibly lower score per se) that they can handle failure.”</p>

<p>After criticising my points above, how can you state this? You’re saying that there is absolutely no possibility that anyone with a degree of perfectionism that great can handle failure. A generalisation such as that is extremely irresponsible coming from an admissions blogger such as yourself, and I refuse to be ashamed of my comments when your own are highly inappropriate, albeit in a different manner. </p>

<p>So you’re saying that studying for a test can’t possibly cause one “to gain knowledge or understanding of or skill in by study, instruction, or experience”? Oh, dear. Does studying for any test cause one to learn then? Or is the SAT a mystical beast that refutes all possibility of learning? Or, if you’re more specifically referencing those students who are already in the top range, as I must assume you are (otherwise, that would just seem stupid) you don’t think that even they can learn? I know for a fact after getting a 780 on my math section, I knew that I didn’t know something afterwards, and I learned it (although in my defense, I didn’t study for it, and I only retook the test to improve my overall score, not simply my math score - and it did improve, and it did not detract from my life in any way shape or form). I’d also like to take this opportunity to absolutely destroy the idea that one has to specifically study for the SAT to take it again and get a higher score, as normal classes tend to increase your scores. Thus, just because someone is going to take the SAT again doesn’t mean that they’re freaking out and studying more - another generalisation.</p>

<p>“…the “experience” of high learning that you assumed I did not have (an assumption you made for no reason other to make a rather nasty and insulting point which would have had no basis in fact or logic, even if it were true).”</p>

<p>If you’ll notice, I did not state that you hadn’t had the experience yourself, as can be gleaned from the use of the adverb “perhaps” below:</p>

<p>“…perhaps you haven’t had the experience yourself, so you immediately attack the actions of those people who can and do.”</p>

<p>And by “ignorance” of students of high calibre, I mean a lack of direct social interaction with the very people that you criticise. When was the last time you were in a high school with students that WERE obsessed with the SAT? I know very many, but I can tell you that your accusations of a lack of ability for coping with failure are absolutely ridiculous in many cases.</p>

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<p>"What Mollie said. There AREN’T people like that. People like that cannot handle MIT without changing their attitudes, at least to some degree. "</p>

<p>Yes there are. In fact, I knew a guy who was a total perfectionist at MIT. He ended up getting an A+ in nearly every class in his major and then was recruited to be on the faculty. At one point he told me he thought he was not doing well because he wasn’t getting much research done freshman year. </p>

<p>Under today’s standards, maybe this guy doesn’t even get in MIT because people are paranoid about perfectionists. Not everybody is going to fail a test. </p>

<p>And i’ve said this before, trying to ascertain who can overcome failure is not an easy science. I was in danger in getting a “B” in a very difficult, advanced math class (sort of like 18.022) in high school. I treated it like it was a crisis, adjusted my studying, and got a 97% on the final and pulled out the “A”. In those days, it probably did mean something in admissions. I probably wouldn’t have gotten into MIT or Caltech with a “B” in that class. Anyway, I would have been reluctant to even discuss that on an application because there were a couple of MOSP people who got A’s who didn’t even do the homework. I wouldn’t want to advertise the fact that I had trouble with something. There were a lot of people who just gave up in that class and got B’s or worse, and they probably would have gotten points under today’s system for supposedly dealing with failure well. I wonder about those guys who qualified for MOSP; would they be up a creek because they never had trouble with anything?</p>

<p>There’s nothing wrong with feeling a good or even great performance is unacceptable. And I think a lot of guys who were perfectionists in high school would recognize that possibly things would change at MIT. I mean, high school is generally pretty easy compared to MIT and everyone knows that.</p>

<p>I don’t think retaking the SAT is a good thing; I never did it. It doesn’t look as good for one thing. Hopefully, you study hard enough during your regular classes and develop enough of an intuition for the subjects that getting 750+ is a piece of cake. I don’t know if cramming for the SATII would even work; probably it would be difficult to get a very high score. I agree with Mollie that it’s a pretty simplistic exam, but that’s all the more reason why you should ace it.</p>

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<p>I just think it’s useful to consider the return on investment. If we’re talking about devoting a week of serious studying to get a score 100 points better on a subject test, I’d say that’s probably worth it. If we’re talking about devoting a month of serious studying to get a score 20 points better (or possibly 20 points worse), I don’t think that’s worth it.</p>

<p>There are other aspects of the application that are more worthwhile in terms of the application, and also in terms of personal knowledge.</p>

<p>I don’t think, for the record, that people with perfect grades and perfect scores are actually penalized in the admissions process for not having to deal with failure. But I think there’s a difference between having an outstanding record at a top high school and participating in national-level math and science contests and having an outstanding record at a run-of-the-mill public high school – speaking from my own experience, the second kind of person is less aware that perfection probably isn’t going to be possible for him or her at MIT.</p>

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<p>@collegealum: fair enough, I shouldn’t have made an absolute statement. But I think we can agree that the number of people who can pull straight As at MIT is relatively small. I’m not referring to perfectionists necessarily, I’m referring to the sort of people that seem to think it’s the end of the world because they got a 690 on an SAT test. Those sorts of people will not do well at MIT, unless they are so good as to never do remotely poorly on an exam or pset. I don’t think people with perfect scores are penalized in admissions. But those with perfect scores and not much else (perhaps because they spent all their time studying for the SAT?) most certainly are.</p>

<p>“After criticising my points above, how can you state this? You’re saying that there is absolutely no possibility that anyone with a degree of perfectionism that great can handle failure.”
Oh please, I never said that. Let’s not twist my arguments into such extremes, okay?</p>

<p>“A generalisation such as that is extremely irresponsible coming from an admissions blogger such as yourself, and I refuse to be ashamed of my comments when your own are highly inappropriate, albeit in a different manner.”
I’m sorry, what exactly have I said that was at all inappropriate? You can disagree with me all you want, but that doesn’t make my comments “extremely irresponsible” or “highly inappropriate,” and I’m frankly offended.</p>

<p>And no, I wouldn’t call studying for the SAT “learning.” Studying for other tests, sure. But studying for the SAT is an exercise in learning how to take a multiple choice test. I can think of many, many more personally enriching activities (academic and otherwise) than studying for the SAT. (This is not to say that you shouldn’t study at all…I refer you to Mollie’s comment on returns in investment.) And of course smart people are capable of learning. Seriously, you need to stop twisting my words in a desperate attempt to make me sound ridiculous. The world is not black and white, I can disagree with you in details and degrees without believing that the earth revolves around the sun.</p>

<p>“Thus, just because someone is going to take the SAT again doesn’t mean that they’re freaking out”
I’m not saying that people who are retaking the SAT are freaking out. I’m saying that there is a problem that some people DO freak out.</p>

<p>“If you’ll notice, I did not state that you hadn’t had the experience yourself, as can be gleaned from the use of the adverb “perhaps” below:”
You proposed, based on NO information about me whatsoever, that I was incapable of higher learning and insinuated that I “attack” those who enjoy learning out of nothing more than spite or jealousy. I happen to have logical reasons for my opinion, whether you agree with them or not, but you chose to ignore those to make a hypothetical personal attack. It was quite the nasty thing to say to anyone, “perhaps” or not. </p>

<p>“When was the last time you were in a high school with students that WERE obsessed with the SAT?”
3 years ago. Does that make my arguments more or less valid? I knew many people in high school that had never failed at anything, and were certainly not better people for it. I knew people who freaked out over AP scores, and college admissions, and ECs, and everything under the sun during our senior year. Also please note that I have never criticized those PEOPLE. Read my comments carefully: I am criticizing the SYSTEM which leads to this behavior. I see a problem. You do not. Like I said, we can agree to disagree. But please stop twisting my words and trying to make this into some argument about how I hate people smarter than me, or whatever it is that you’re going for.</p>

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<p>I think at this point someone needs to step in and request for calm in this forum. This is not a place for personal attacks and certainly not ones which are baseless. I think what LauraN is trying to say is that the system is at fault if any student feels the need to re-take a test on which he got an 8something% score. I do not think anyone wants to insinuate that there is anything wrong with this particular person for asking whether 660 is good enough. What was being said is that such a system that forces students to wonder whether any score is good enough is a failure.
Let us all refrain from personal attacks so that this forum can return to being useful.
Thanks!</p>

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<p>to answer the OP’s question, i think the scores are very competitive, but if you know you could score higher on the writing, i suggest you should</p>

<p>a 2300+ would be nice XD</p>

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<p>my scores cr720
wr650
math780</p>

<pre><code> math2 790
math1 790
pyhsics 800
chem 780
</code></pre>

<p>what do u think about mine??i hope they won;t consider writing</p>

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<p>^They are not considering writing this year.</p>