<p>Hey, I have a question that hopefully someone (perhaps a Whartonite) can answer. There are a lot of rumors tossed around about how some SAT Subject Tests work better for admission to certain schools than others. I'm looking to apply ED to Wharton next fall, and I'm currently taking MathIIC & US History in May and Chemistry in June. I'm pretty confident with math and history, but to be honest, science isn't my forte. I have heard people say that Wharton smiles upon their applicants doing well on a SATII foreign language test (ie. french, spanish, chinese). Is there any validity to this statement?</p>
<p>If this turns out to be true or semi-true, do you guys think i should take SATII Chinese in November (the only date its offered) and have the scores rush delivered for ED?</p>
<p>Translation into English:
Wharton likes to see good SATII scores, but seeing a native Chinese speaker get anything less than an 800 on the test isn't very impressive (look at your percentile). Just take the two or three tests you think you can do best on.</p>
<p>I took all the tests you mentioned; MathII, US History, and Chem and scored very high in all of them and im going to wharton. I think math will be most important.</p>
<p>"i got a 780 for Math II. Should I retake that?"</p>
<p>Noooooo! Admissions to a place like Penn is not like a AIME competition where the person with the highest scores is the "winner". They are glad to reject people w/800s who they don't like and take people w/700s (or even less) who they do like. They are looking for certain minimum scores as a sign of competence and then after that they evaluate the rest of your app. 780 is well above what is needed to show that you are capable of understanding the curriculum. They won't like an 800 one bit better than a 780 - this will get you zero extra consideration. Repeat zero. Concentrate your efforts on the other stuff - "leadership", etc. Taking it again will only make you seem more nerdy.</p>
<p>Does it show something? Yes it does in my opinion, but I don't run the admissions system. But I've come to the conclusion that the adcoms could care less - they are just not shopping for pure supergeniuses (or at least not more than a few to keep their averages up) - they want "well rounded". They'll take a "well rounded" 760 over a "square" 800 any day of the week. I think they ENJOY rejecting 800s and taking people w. 600s - it gives them a thrill to be able to play god like this and it makes the job a lot more interesting than just going down the list in order.</p>
<p>I freakin' hate math, but I took Math IIC because it's one of those recommended ones.</p>
<p>For me it went,</p>
<p>Math 2: 720
Biology E: 740
US History: 760 </p>
<p>Not really incredible, but I don't see a point in retaking SAT IIs. I am taking the SAT I again because I got a 720 on Math, and I just want to boost that score so I can get into Penn's upper 75% range for SAT scores.</p>