<p>My daughter is going to be a senior. Major is undecided. She has taken the SAT twice and received a 720 in math and 590 in critical reading. She is considering Cornell, The College of New Jersey, and Harvard as a long shot. My fear is that her score is not high enough to be admitted to these schools. I am having trouble motivating her to study for the SAT and retake the exam in the fall. If anything, my suggestions are turning her off. Should I be concerned? Any ideas on what I can do to help my daughter improve her SAT scores?</p>
<p>your daughter should be scoring atleast 2150+ on SAT especially if she is not URM. personally if i were you i would threaten to beat her.</p>
<p>Eventually she will have to realize that even though it is possible to get into the colleges she'll apply to with those SAT scores, her chances will improve if she improves her scores. I'm sure she knows that. I wouldn't try to stress her out about it (Honey, you're going to have a harder time getting in if you don't take it again!) because she probably is aware of everything you would say. I think that since she is going to be a senior, she should ultimately make this decision on her own. She has taken the SAT two times already. I would not want to retake a four-hour test, especially if my scores don't improve dramatically. I think you should remind her that while her math score is great, her critical reading score is low for a school like Harvard and that you think that her chances will increase if she does a lot of preparation to raise her score, but also that you know that she's already taken the SAT twice and that takes quite a time commitment (preparation + taking it). Then I think you should give her a bit of time to think, and let her decide.</p>
<p>I agree that she needs to make the decision on her own. 1310 composite Critical Reading & Math will make her chances for Cornell and Harvard considerably lower, but if the rest of her application is amazing, who knows.</p>
<p>Bribe her with a car, and when she does well and gets into Cornell tell her you lied :)</p>
<p>If I were you, I'd just say, "[Daughter], I've been thinking about our disagreements over the SATs. You're an intelligent young woman, not a child, and I relize I've been treating you like a child. If you want my advice, I'm here, and if there's any support you want as you make these decisions let me know and I'll do my best. But I'm going to stop nagging you and trust you to make your own decisions about how to approach college applications."</p>
<p>The information she needs is available to her, and it's not as if not improving her SAT score means she can't get a good postsecondary education. I suspect that once she doesn't have you to blame for her not wanting to work on SAT prep she'll take it more seriously, but even if she doesn't it's her life (as I'm sure she's been telling you).</p>
<p>Um...she has pretty much NO chance at Cornell with those scores. You could tell her that she will NOT get into Cornell and will thus fail at life unless she gets her SAT scores up, or you could try and bribe her with a car, like someone else said. Or, you could threaten her with pain or death or grounding or something.</p>