Is there any advantage to meeting certain score thresholds on SAT? Would 700 vs 690 be especially impactful? Or 1500 vs 1490?
Trying to decide how helpful retaking would be.
It would depend on the school and major. For example, some auto merit scholarships have hard cutoff thresholds. If you provide more details, everyone could give advice specific to your student’s situation.
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My DD has 690 EBRW, 780M will likely major in bio or chem. Not sure on colleges. She likes small, more remote. Mountains a bonus😂
FWIW, the only guidance I got for my S22 is to only retake if he thinks there is a realistic shot of boosting the score 50 points.
Not helpful, but one would like to believe that they matter close to zero. On the other hand, I would really want to reach the next milestone because who really knows for sure.
I definitely think it is helpful, but I think the key question is how stressful is taking the SAT for your kid? Does your kid want to retake it? So much of the SAT is a mind game. If they’re not motivated or don’t believe they can get higher, the second test is doomed.
My kid retook the SAT twice. For the first retake, they went in excited to try to raise their score, and they did, by 30 points. They were very happy with this score and felt that the test was a lot easier because they felt more comfortable with the test, since they did very little formal prep.
They likely wouldn’t have taken it a third time had we not already paid for it in case the second was canceled due to COVID. They took the third and will get the results this coming week. Even though they weren’t stressed per se by the third exam, they clearly went into it saying that this was their last test.
I think the 30 points will be helpful for my kid because it took them from the 50% SAT at their reaches to above, and in some cases to the 75%.
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My D had an almost identical score to yours, except flipped to 680M/780EBRW. She debated a long time about trying to break 700 on the math but in the end, she didn’t retest as the advice from her tutor, GC, and a private college counselor was that another 20 points wouldn’t matter. She was among the top scores in her HS and was within the mid-50% or above at the schools on her list. She is attending a T20 LAC as a non-STEM major, accepted in ED. In the end, it didn’t matter at all. YMMV.
As an opinion, meeting SAT thresholds for specific colleges of interest may be more important than meeting generalized thresholds. As a guideline, it may be preferred that the lower of the two scores meet or exceed the 25th percentile for that section, as posted on individual Common Data Sets. Hypothetically, then, for a college with a 25th percentile EBRW score of, say, 680, the difference between a submitted score of 670 and 680 may be more significant than that between 690 and 700.
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As mentioned in my Reddit reply, a higher score is always better (or at least as good) but 10 points is 10 points, IMO. 690 to 700 isn’t more meaningful than 700 to 710. I think AOs have been doing this long enough that any round number connotations aren’t applicable.
(A scholarship with a 700 hard cutoff is an obvious exception.)
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