<p>Colleges SAY they only consider your highest scores for admissions, but do they actually do that? I've heard that if you have a bad score the first time around, and then retake the test, and do better, colleges will still penalize/possibly reject you for getting the low score, even though you improved when you retook it. Anyone know anything about this?</p>
<p>Well you only send them your best SAT score, they will not see the other results.</p>
<p>Uh, you can't. The official SAT score report included EVERY single test you've ever taken.</p>
<p>yeah, though I honestly believe that they will primarily consider your best scores, though you can't blame them for subconsciously recognizing the other scores.</p>
<p>Don't listen to Fusionice, colleges will see ALL of your scores from past tests, including SAT IIs. If a college says they will consider the high scores, then they they will consider the highest scores, why would they need to lie about that? Colleges understand that not everyone can do well on the SAT for the very first time. If you look on the "results for graduated seniors" thread or look at individual sections of colleges for the stats of the people that were admitted, you will see a lot of people ended up retaking, and still got into very selective schools.</p>
<p>Well, it's a three hour thing that really depends on personal factors, i.e.: sleepiness, nervousness, forgetfullness about bringing good pencils, forgetfullness about turning off computer at home, explosion of a Sun, or Universe suddenly collapsing into a 3.14x10^-315 black hole.
So, if you went from 260 to 2400 in three monthes; this could mean two things:
a) There was something wrong (and I mean, WRONG) with your first try like one of those things from the list above.
b) You didn't sleep at all and memorized every word in a dictionary, read 100 books, and solved everything from AofP (and proved that some of the answers listed there were wrong).
c) Wild invaders from the planet #132481 reprogrammed your mind.
So, the only thing that can worry you here is b) and I think if you're able to accomplish such jump in three monthes you would have a full ride+couple hundreds thousands dollar a year from Cambridge, or, if you're unlucky -- Harvard.</p>
<p>Ok... I'm not talking about improvements THAT big... I'm talking about going from about a 2000 to around 2150, 150 points in about 9 months. That's not too drastic. </p>
<p>Thanks for your commentary!</p>
<p>the see all the test scores but consider only the highest</p>
<p>they dont see the scores for the sat exams you've taken before high school..</p>