<p>Hi, danas, I’m glad you’re weighing in here. I wonder if some of those top colleges screen their legacies, etc. by being very stringent on test scores. I think at the top of the desirability heap there isn’t any college that admits even half of its legacy applicants, although at most the legacy applicants have a higher base acceptance rate than the overall applicant pool.</p>
<p>Another factor that reduces the number of places for top scorers as listed by the College Board is the growing percentage of international students at top schools. Incoming classes at Harvard and Princeton have recently been over 10% international students, and growing. Am I wrong in thinking the commonly published College Board numbers of high scorers are US only?
I’m a little surprised that there haven’t been more posts on this thread. I think many readers are anxious 17 year olds with not a lot of time to dig into this.</p>
<p>For the SATs, the [College</a> Board](<a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools) says:
</p>
<p>This means that a student’s SAT score is really +/- 30 points or so. If taken many times, a superscored SAT can reasonably be expected to be on average 30 points higher than the single sitting. And 55% of students take the SAT test [more</a> than once](<a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools). So it’s more accurate to say the number of students with a 2400 superscored could be as high as the number with a 2310 single sitting score (2400 - (30 X 3).</p>
<p>So although there are only 269 seniors who received a 2400 single sitting score, there are 4,522 who scored 2310 and therefore have a reasonable chance of having a 2400 superscore if taken several times. This is not an unreasonable assumption since 9,857 seniors scored [800</a> on math](<a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools), 8,567 scored [800</a> on critical reading](<a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools), and 4,443 scored [800</a> on writing](<a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools). And these numbers don’t include students who received an 800 on at least one section as a junior.</p>
<p>The OP’s table also omits juniors who did not take the SAT at all senior year. This is probably more common for juniors who score highly; they have little incentive to retake the test senior year.</p>
<p>Adding the number of juniors who scored well enough to not take the exam at all senior year further increases the number of seniors appling to college with a superscored value of 2400. Even if these estimates are off by 50%, the number of students applying to college with extremely high SAT scores can be many-fold higher than the initial table suggests.</p>
<p>Hi, SarahsDad, </p>
<p>I have to check some links and do more writing than I have time to do tonight to respond to the questions and comments you and danas have posted. In some cases if you look very carefully at the definitional footnotes in the College Board web documents you will see what populations and phenomena are considered as College Board reports these scores. I’ll try to resume the discussion after meeting College Board representatives (and ACT representatives, etc.) at a conference I am attending this week.</p>
<p>According to the College Board “College Bound Seniors” 2007 report, they use each student’s last test taken only. The March, 2007 testing date was the last date included.
1,001,667 last took senior year
485,401 last took junior year
a few last took soph and freshman year
1,494,531 college bound seniors in total
So testers who stopped taking the test Junior year and earlier are included.</p>
<p>Danas - ahh yes, well that would make a difference. Thanks for clearing that up. Hard to dig out the details from the College Board site. For instance, how many exams are administered each year (to all grades)? And what is the average number of exams taken per student?</p>
<p>Hi, </p>
<p>I met a College Board representative at a conference this evening, and I have his business card and will contact him when he is back at the office to find out who in the research offices of College Board can help answer questions like these. A lot of the basic data is in the annual College Bound Seniors </p>
<p><a href=“College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools”>College Board - SAT, AP, College Search and Admission Tools; </p>
<p>report.</p>
<p>Now it’s time to bump this thread, as other threads are touching on related issues.</p>
<p>i got 2400 on the SAT. on one sitting. My school rank is (barely) top 10%</p>
<p>Does this mean i am pretty much in Ivies? of course, there are a lot of variables, but i got decent leadership and ECs. </p>
<p>So i figure that i am gonna be a voluntary guinea pig on this. If i get in, then the “high scorers get in” theorem might have some cred.</p>
<p>A high score on the SAT is a high score, and that is one element of making a case that a student is ready for challenging college study. It doesn’t make any difference to the colleges if the score came after one sitting, or ten, for reasons already mentioned above in this thread. A reasonably high score is necessary, but a peak is not completely sufficient, for admission at the most selective colleges. Some high scorers don’t get into their personal first-choice colleges. </p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/377882-how-do-top-scorers-tests-fail-gain-admission-top-schools.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/377882-how-do-top-scorers-tests-fail-gain-admission-top-schools.html</a> </p>
<p>Good luck in the admission season. It’ll be interesting to hear where various applicants fill into the entering classes of the colleges mentioned above.</p>
<p>By the way, I have an email in to the College Board asking about the issue of how many individuals achieve “superscored” SAT scores at each composite score level.</p>
<p>i dont’ thing CB compiles data onsuperscored, although they should.</p>
<p>College Board can run a special report on any information in its extensive database, although it may not think this is a high-priority task at this time of year with seniors in suspense about their scores. I’ll see what comes of my request for information.</p>
<p>I missed this thread before, but since tokenadult linked it in another thread, I’ll revive it a little.</p>
<p>There was a lot of discussion of this last spring. Someone – I forget who – had a pretty good analysis of the effect of superscoring. Essentially, what I took away from it was that superscoring had less effect than one might think, and that you could probably estimate the numerical effect of superscoring by dropping down a notch or two on the chart. That would suggest there might be 600-700 kids with 2400s superscored. Except, at that level, it’s probably a lot fewer than that, since relatively few kids who score in that range are going to be retaking the tests. Some do, but I’ve never seen anything that suggests that a kid with 2300+ on a single test is going to better his chances by retaking.</p>
<p>This thread is all very interesting, but as much time as I spend on this website, post #14 came as a surprise:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>WHAT?!?! Are you sure? Don’t they at least LOOK at your test date(s)? </p>
<p>I’m in my junior year and I took the SAT last month to see where I stood, expecting to take it again later in the year, and I got a 1600/2390. I thought that it would look really good to colleges that I did so well in one try, and I was like “I’m done with this SAT Reasoning stuff forevaaa.” But if they don’t even care that I did it in one try… should I go for those extra ten points?! Or is there not enough of a difference between 2390 and 2400? </p>
<p>It might sound like a dumb question, but I mean, if I can get a 2400 without colleges even noticing that I took it again… should I? fldksjfkldshjk freaking outtt</p>
<p>You can cease testing if you already have a 2390. You have better things to do with your time.</p>
<p>That’s what I’d tell anyone else (and probably with condescending, flame-y remarks.) But I’m a lot more rational when I’m looking at things objectively. 
</p>
<p>But if you don’t think there’s any advantage to going for the 2400… I trust you.</p>
<p>don’t even ask “should I retake a 2390”
colleges will be completelly impressed by that score, superscored or singlesitting. Spend your time on essays/EC’s
I do agree that taking it multiple times and superscoring does not have any negative effect at most colleges. That is, within reason. if you take it 8 times and superscore, that’s something else</p>
<p>The simplest reason why colleges superscore is that it’s in a college’s best interest to report the highest possible subscores for each admitted student to US News, the bond rating agencies, etc. </p>
<p>After a certain point, a higher score on the SATs often says relatively little about an individual student’s ability to do well at a given school, but each individual student who manages to score above the critical 25/75 percentile cutlines for the individual subtest will incrementally help to raise the numbers reported to those external sources. </p>
<p>Those numbers, in turn, can generate higher rankings, more future applicants, higher bond ratings, and lower interest rates when the college borrows for new construction.</p>
<p>So it’s in the interest of each individual college to encourage its prospective students to take the SATs several times and count only the highest scores reported for each sub-section.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>The puzzler is that many colleges (for example, a lot of state universities) only consider single-sitting scores. And “superscoring” the ACT is still rare, although I learned here on CC that Florida State does that. </p>
<p>By the way, I’m still awaiting an answer from College Board about how different the listing of top-scoring students would look if “superscoring” were the basis for the score table. As it is, the College Board reports the best single-sitting score for each distinct individual in a given high school graduating class who tested during high school.</p>