Is there any advantage to students who score well in one attempt compared to students who take several attempts to score similar or higher?
In my mind the biggest advantage is that you are DONE. No more prep and wasted Saturday mornings. No more stress and what ifs etc. You can move one to other aspects of your applications. Juniors and seniors are usually very busy. Most not only have very rigorous schedules but also leadership positions in their ECs. It is great to have one less thing to worry about.
College admission wise for most colleges I personally do not think it matters if you get the high score in one or two tries. For colleges that want to see your testing history it might matter after 2 or 3 tries but that is debatable.
Let’s say that student X who study from a book or something for a month and aces it because he is an excellent student while student Y starts taking prep classes after 8th grade, make several attempts and then finally scores good enough. Is there any difference between their achievements? Obviously student Y has more financial resources and has perseverance while X is just independent and intelligent with a good foundation of math and English.
The SAT has two sections so for schools that super score a students will send a maximum of 2 tests. For schools that do not super score a student can send just one score (the best they got). Those colleges don’t know how many times your child took the test.
So you only want to know what happens to schools that require to see the whole history. Those colleges are the most competitive colleges and usually have single digit acceptance rates. There are SO many reasons a student gets rejected that it is very hard to pinpoint and say it is because they took the SAT too many times. On the other hand why do they want to see the history? Probably it plays some part in the decision but I don’t think anyone can say how big or small that part is.
I think that student Y is trying to game the system. Student X really knows the material. Take the test once or twice only.
The general rule of thumb is that it’s fine to take it up to three times. I have seen this debated extensively. There are senior posters who say it doesn’t matter if you take if fifteen times, if the college superscores and doesn’t want to see all tests taken. My opinion is that most colleges would prefer to see as few sittings as possible. It certainly never looks bad to take the test twice, because so many people do. For colleges that require all tests from all sittings, I certainly think that taking it more than three times is going to look bad.
At the end of the day, grades are always most important. High test scores matter for lots of other reasons, but if your grades are poor and your test scores are high, regardless of how many times you took the test, you still aren’t getting into Harvard.
^ I would amend that statement from grades are always more important to add “at most schools”. There are a handful where scores have a greater weight than GPA like U Nebraska. Not a top 10 school but a flagship.
Unless GPA/Rank/SAT/ACT/PSAT/AP/SATll/Recs support each other, it’s just really hard to judge an academic profile.
One can have inflated GPA from a private school or another may have a fluke high score on SAT so colleges need to consider whole picture and consider performance during all 4 years.
Another thing is effect of ECs, off course a kid dedicated to practicing sports or rehearsing for school plays after school every evening has less time for study compared to ones whose ECs aren’t as time consuming. Even for same ECs different schools have different time demands and for same AP course, workload and rigor vary a lot.
@“Erin’s Dad” , thanks, I wasn’t aware of that.
@“Erin’s Dad” do you know of what other colleges than U of Nabraska weigh standardized scores higher?
In my opinion, it depends on the score. Iv’e seen some people report scores of “1370 one sitting” my thought was that he/she should have taken it again. Maybe they could have gotten a 1500. I think an SAT should always be taken twice .
I only looked at flagships. At one time U Montana and U South Carolina were the same but they have since made GPA and Scores Very Important. And of course U Tx where Class Rank is #1 and GPA is not considered.
What about automated admission schools, do they care about IB/SAT/ACT/AP/SAT ll scores? What if a national merit student isn’t in top 10% of their class? How does it work? What percentage of their admissions are non-automated?
Each school will be different. Some auto admit schools will want SAT or ACT scores (admission is usually a combo of GPA and score). Generally IB/AP don’t matter.