I am neither startingblock nor swimdad99, but I would say that taking the SAT2s in October senior year is pretty late in the game. To some extent it is dependent on the sport involved. Many here will tell you that Ivy recruiting in the sports with which they are familiar is all but over by the ED or EA deadlines. In my son’s sport, football, recruiting goes on through January. My guess is that the timing of Ivy recruiting has a lot to do with whether your sport is an early signing day sport or a February signing day sport.
Either way, realize that the normal process in the Ivy League is academic pre read of transcript/test scores/senior schedule, then decision whether to offer/accept a likely letter, then submitting the application, then review and issuance of the letter. In my son’s circumstance, nothing really serious happened until after the academic pre read was done. If you wait until October senior year to take the SAT2s, and they are required by the school, then a pre read can’t even be done until sometime in November when the scores are released, uncertainty creeps n to the coaches’ evaluation process (does he wait for you or offer a letter to a kid who is a rough equivalent athletically with all the testing, etc done and reviewed?) and the time frame gets compressed. Does that mean that Ivy coaches won’t wait for a certain recruit to take the October SAT2s? Of course not, like everything else, it is a sliding scale. You may have a real strong academic kid, where the SAT2s are likely not to move the needle in a negative direction with admissions, or you may have a real strong athletic kid who is deciding between soccer at Duke or Yale. But I am firm believer that recruiting is like wooing a pretty woman. You want to remove as many impediments as possible to her saying yes to a date, or in this case to a coach pulling the trigger on offering a likely letter. Through that lens, taking the SAT2’s in the spring of junior year seems like low hanging fruit.