SAT II's

Test Preparation
1

<p>I just wanted to know if you take the SAT 'II the first time and do bad on them and decide to take them over will it effect your admissions process seeing that the first time you took the test your did bad but the second time you improved.</p>

<p>Also I wanted to know will the colleges recieve both of your test scores the first and second, or will they see the higher of the two.</p>

2

<ol>
<li><p>Just say you weren't feeling well for the test or something. They'll look at your higher scores anyway.</p></li>
<li><p>They'll receive all your SAT I/II scores from high school.</p></li>
</ol>

3

<ol>
<li><p>Most colleges only consider your top 2/3 SAT II scores. In fact, most likely at many colleges, the AdCom will not even see any lower scores - all your "vital" academic data is condensed onto one page by a secretary or a computer for the AdCom to look at (at least thats what I've heard)</p></li>
<li><p>Yup, there's no way to "hold back" any of your SAT I/II scores if you took the test in high school.</p></li>
</ol>

4

<p>If you write more than 3 SAT IIs (eg. Math Ic/Math IIc/Chem/Eng-Lit or Chem/Bio-Molecular/MathIc/MathIIc/Bio . . . assuming Math Ic and IIc count as separate SAT IIs), do adcoms pick the 3 highest scores or do they look at all scores of the tests you write anyways? </p>

<p>Which schools will consider the 3 highest scores?</p>

5

<p>as tanman noted, they (the selective colleges that require SAT II's) say that they consider ONLY the required # comprised of your HIGHEST scores, no others.</p>

<p>Haven't done a survey on this, but some of the Ivies in particular (& a few others) are still holding out on requiring 3; many other highly-selective schools went from requiring 3 to 2 once the new SAT I came out. Suspect that once the SAT 1 writing becomes more institutionalized in the next year or 2, holdouts might move to requiring 2 SAT II's, but in the meantime just look on the target school's admissions web page.</p>

<p>Here's a web page that occasionally updates this info. Beware that you should personally check at each school for updates:
<a href="http://www.compassprep.com/admissions_req_subjects.aspx%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.compassprep.com/admissions_req_subjects.aspx&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

6

<p>couple of other caveats.....the issue of whether colleges will assess all vs top 2 or 3 only has been the subject of much discussion on this board for the past month. If you want to read more, peruse my posts from the past month by clicking on my screen name. I do not recall hearing from someone who knew the UC's well, so they are unknown on this policy issue to me; but going w/ tanman's logic that the highest scores are distilled down to a cover page for the adcoms, it would be hard for me to believe that any high-volume institution, like a UC, would do anything different than what has been said so far.....but the UC's are the UC's.....known to beat to their own drummer.</p>

<p>Also, some universities (or schools within universities), like MIT, require specific SAT II's, like math & sciences. You'll need to know precisely what your target schools require subject-wise.</p>