How do colleges view SAT Subject Tests

I’m a little bit confused about how colleges view subject tests. I read that colleges only consider the highest 2 subject test scores you submit. Does that mean they will completely disregard the third? I’m thinking of doing a subject test in math and one in science (since I want to major in science) but I also want to take SAT Spanish because 1. I’m not a native speaker, but I’ve worked really hard studying Spanish and I absolutely love the language 2. A lot of my involvements in school deal with Spanish (Spanish honors society, Spanish club, Spanish awards, etc…) so I really want to showcase myself, an asian, who excels at Spanish. Will colleges not consider this third subject test if they only look at the two highest test scores? I guess I’m just asking on an explanation on how the subject tests are viewed and considered.

I think every college will consider every score you send them, even if they don’t require one. For example, at Cornell’s info session I went to last year, the speaker says they don’t technically consider the writing portion of the SAT, but they just can’t block it out because it’s on their monitors when they look at the SAT score. So every score you send will play a role. The required tests do have more of an influence than supplementals, but I’d argue that if you have solid required SAT 2s then the supplementals won’t do any harm if you do well. Just remember, because every score you send will have a certain amount of weight, doing bad on a test will play a role as well.

Depends on the college.

I agree with everything the above comment said! Also, unless the school you’re looking at requires you to send all scores (Yale does with SAT IIs and Georgetown does with all tests) you could always take all three and if one is substantially lower than the other two you don’t even have to send it. But if you do well on all three there’s definitely no harm in sending extras!

Oh ok thanks guys!