<p>I have heard that the most a student improves thier score is about 30 pts. </p>
<p>If my daughter is a weak math student and has a busy summer planned w/o much time to study, should she retake the test in Oct. if her score will only improve minimally( if at all )?</p>
<p>Her scores were V750 M490 Writing 690</p>
<p>We await SAT II score and do not know her rank or GPA yet but she has a strong transcript w/ AP s and honors and HS GPA for her junior year 97.42</p>
<p>Minimal EC's but has held a p/t job for a year and a half and has a creative art and photography portfolio (she attends art school afterschool)</p>
<p>Should she include a portfolio in her application even though she is not applying to the art dept?</p>
<p>How will schools view her weak math score along side her higher verbal and writing score? She wants to be an English major, perhaps they will be more forgiving of the weak math?</p>
<p>We do not have minority factors, our EFC is high and we are from Long Island......I guess this all works against her too?</p>
<p>She is looking @ Kenyon,Bard, Skidmore ,NYU as reach schools and Marist or Quinnipiac possibly as safeties'</p>
<p>What do you think?</p>
<p>Any suggestions for less selective excellent English Dept. schools?</p>
<p>if she can find time, then, yes, a retake is worth it. More importantly, the math section is the easiest to study for; a 50-60 point increase would look much better, and balance the other strong scores. With a few weekends of time, a 100 point increase is not uncommon</p>
<p>Check out the Xiggi method 'stickied' at the top of the thread.</p>
<p>You might also consider having your daughter try the ACT instead. Many people feel that the math questions on the ACT are more straighforward, so some kids do better with the ACT. But either way your daughter needs to get some studying in - if she doesn't want to do that, then a better course of action is to revise the college list. Or consider adding more test-optional schools, like Connecticut College or Sarah Lawrence as well as Bard.</p>
<p>The math is easier to bring up than the verbal, so it might be a good idea to encourage your daughter to do some prep work on her own to try to get into the solid 500s at least.</p>
<p>I agree with the other posters . Spend some time researching what Xiggi has to say about the math. I recall him saying at one time that only answering the questions ranked 1 and 2 of 5 of the difficulty scale would achieve a higher score than we have here. Get busy looking for patterns in the missed answers. Is she missing only the difficult ones? Is she getting hung up on one problem and racing through the remainder? (that's my guess.) Seems like test taking skills and especially strategy (skip the hard ones) could be improved but you need to do the diagnostics. Use the CB tests only. Good luck.</p>
<p>Did your D take math during her jr. year? If her jr. year GPA was 97.42 with a math class, then I would be surprised if she couldn't get her math well above 490. Is there a reason you seem so certain that her score would only improve minimally, and possibly not at all, on a re-take. I wouldn't let the fact that D will be busy and therefore presumably unable to do in-depth math studying discourage her from doing at least some studying and trying to raise her score to the low to mid-500's. Good luck.</p>
<p>Based upon the improvements that I've seen possible and in fact mainstream as posted here on CC, I'll be advising my kids to take the SAT 1's at least twice.</p>