<p>When my older daughter was a junior there was one father who got in her face and asked what her SAT score was. Thank goodness she did not tell him. Nothing in my town surprises me anymore. This fall will be particularly bad as I will be the parent of a junior sitting at her games. Some of these parents are just awful.</p>
<p>Agentninetynine,
S2 had a friend who took the SAT many, many times. Conventional wisdom is that one or two is fine, but no more than three. I heard lots of adcoms say that if a kid takes it more than three times, they don’t think well of it. They’d rather you get out and have a life. 
</p>
<p>Personally, if my kid had two low scores on the SAT, I’d suggest he try the ACT. Some kids do better on one test vs. the other. My niece had a 2070 on the SAT after two tries, but a 34 ACT. Older S took the SAT once, in March of junior year. S2 took it in March of junior year, and retook in June. I was glad he waited til junior year because his scores went WAY up (260 points) from the soph year PSAT, just based on having covered more math and having done IB English.</p>
<p>I tell folks to get the SAT-IIs and SAT/ACT finished by the end of junior year, and to take the SAT-IIs as soon as one finishes the appropriate course, i.e., Math Level II after pre-calc, USH right after AP US Hist. For science courses, it depends on how well the course correlates to the SAT-II. The teacher may know, or one can get a study guide and see where the gaps are. S1 took SAT-IIs in 9th, 11th and 12th, and S2 took two in 10th and one in 11th. </p>
<p>Why by the end of junior year? 1) You don’t want to deal with this stuff fall of senior year with apps, essays, sports, ECs and AP/IB classes; 2) you want some real scores to assess what range of schools your kid should consider.</p>
<p>"Post 293 - doesn’t that presuppose that there is some fixed set of characteristics that “win”? See, I don’t believe that. For every valedictorian who placed first in state in swimming who got in, there’s another person with the same characteristics who didn’t. All you can do is be the best you you can, and then roll the dice. "</p>
<p>“The best you can” seems to be a moving goal post. I think I posted this on this thread before. Duke uses a 5 point scale for 6 characteristics and used 5s on 5 APs for full 5 points for academic achievement. According to the Dean of admissions, 50% of their applicants last year met this criteria which they defined 7 years ago. If 16,000 applicants meet a defined criterion, does that hold any value whatsoever for granularity?</p>
<p>You can waist time trying to make sense of admissions decisions to no end. It all comes down to ability to pay.</p>
<p>Regarding SATs and how many times they should be taken. This is an example of how many times are too many:</p>
<p>I know a 15 year old hs sophomore who has already taken the SAT 4 times. Once to test into an AP class for ninth grade, once to test into a middle school summer program, once in middle school “to get a baseline score to be ready for the PSAT, so we’ll know what she needs to work on”, and once this winter for ? reason. She also will have taken tho PSAT 3 times: 9, 10, and 11th grade.</p>
<p>She is bright, has a great deal of anxiety, and is as nervous as a cat, which makes sense because she has tiger parents.</p>
<p>She was in tears during a superbowl party because she was the only kid (in a group of other very high achieving kids) who had to leave early to “work on an essay”. This was the year our local team was playing in the superbowl. Pretty sure that that essay could have waited. She left in tears.</p>
<p>Wow, eastcoast. I’m speechless, that poor kid. What is wrong with these parents? That is incredible pressure to put on a child. Sure, we’d like to see our kids enrolled at their top school (complete with merit aid, natch) but if that doesn’t happen, life will go on. Most of us here on CC did not go to HYPS and somehow we managed to eek out an existence.</p>
<p>The best advice I’ve heard on this was from Davidson’s dean of admissions. According to him, “If you’re taking the SAT so often that it starts looking like an extracurricular activity, it is time to reevaluate your priorities.”</p>
<p>I took my ACT and three subject tests in December for the first time.</p>
<p>Omg don’t do that. Horrid idea.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>There was a kid in my son’s high school who claimed that he had gotten into Yale, but instead decided to attend Purdue. This kid was of South Asian ancestry, was not an athlete, was not in the top 5% of the class and the counselors’ office knew nothing about the matter. No one at his school has gotten into Yale in at least a decade, perhaps never.</p>
<p>Yet all of a sudden, several AP teachers were encouraging their juniors to all apply to Yale next year. They had no clue on how tough the competition really is.</p>
<p>Every year we get a flurry of threads in late March/early April started by irate students with exactly the question asked by the OP. It is like clockwork, and these kids are p****ed. Someone they know got in and they were rejected, and they are convinced the other kid was NOT better qualified than they are.</p>
<p>Yikes, Alexsss. Your post gave me shivers.</p>
<p>Case #1: Last year. We had a student, not in our IB program, get accepted to Harvard. Now, don’t get me wrong, he was smart. 2100 SAT, took lots of AP courses, etc. But he was different. He partied almost every weekend. He was not focused on academics at all. His favorite recreations were hunting and drama technician. He was not even in the top 20 in our school. He would mock us IB students for worrying too much about academics (although he was friends with a lot of them). He post later that he got into Harvard onto Facebook, and his personality would not suggest that he was lying. But hey, he was a very interesting student, a very different personality and a stark contrast from the stereotype. And honesty, he has a healthy mindset. He eventually dropped Harvard for an in-state school because of a confusing financial situation (he has two step-parents) and because he did not think he would enjoy his time at Harvard (I can respect that, that is why I did not apply there). </p>
<p>Case #2: This year, we had a student get into CalTech. This was very perplexing for me, more so that he even applied to CalTech in the first place. He was a decent mathematician, but seeing from what he did in my Calc class, nothing stood out as being CalTech exceptional. But what shocked me more was that his personality could not be more different from the stereotypical CalTech student. He was openly engaged in casual sex (so engaged, the social outcast in me found out directly from him). He had this slacker personality, but did not slack, if that made any sense. He was nonexistent in the school EC scene, at least to my knowledge. He was even rumored to smoke a couple of joint once in a while. </p>
<p>At first, I was perplexed by both. But I guess it just a lesson for me not to be judgmental. Top colleges want diversity, even intellectual diversity. These people are very smart, but just not in the traditional, bookworm-academic sense. I can respect that. Both of these “claims” seem legit, because neither of the two are fake in anyway. They are very outgoing, but not outspoken in anyway nor did they care about what others thought of him.</p>
<p>@agent </p>
<p>Yea. Wouldn’t ever recommend it.
xD</p>
<p>giveme reason.
I’ve heard too many tales of"I’ve got in to __<strong><em>" not a believer. Even a close friend said her DS got into Yale, but chose </em></strong>. Baloney.</p>
<p>^GiveMeReason, you are very right in trying not to be judgmental. What you know of these people is only part of who they are. It is true for all of us that we don’t even fully <em>know</em> ourselves, let alone anyone else. Clearly, the schools saw something in these students which you may not have been privy to or may not have interpreted in the same way. They have more experience than you or I at evaluating these things. While we can’t know their thinking, we can learn to reserve our own judgments.</p>
<p>They may have been accepted, but further success at these schools often draws upon more intelligence than the work in hs does.</p>
<p>i am beginning to feel like i am “he”. I was admitted to a school with an average uw GPA of 3.5-3.9 and a ACT of 26-30. I have a 3.22 uw gpa and a 24 ACT. I feel that if i were to attend this university i would not be very competitive…the only thing going for me is im an eagle scout and i guess 100 hours community service helps</p>
<p>
And that would be true of everyone, would it not?
So you have to do a lot of soul searching to answer whether the school is a good fit for you or not. Maybe it is, maybe you are a “late bloomer” or have a newfound motivation to succeed where in the past you just casually coasted along. Or maybe some other place is better. You have to work this out in yourself, but don’t let anyone else do it FOR you.</p>
<p>I have a question for QuantMech, as I know she is following this thread - when you took your PhD qualifying exams, did you <em>study/prepare</em> for them or did you just wing it or give it a quick brush? And did you pass them the first time through?</p>
<p>It is true, but allowing yourself many distractions in hs won’t help in college where time management is paramount. I have many friends already in college who attest to the fact that the work in college isn’t very difficult, but the volume is something else.
Balance must be learned in hs imo.
∩__∩</p>