<p>wjb, as one of the most conservative prognosticators on the board, I agree that the better score the better chance but a 32 is pretty much mid-pack of enrolled students and as such means to me that is @ the bottom third of the un-hooked kids. I do not agree that you need a hook if you have a 32. I do agree that you are in the deep end of the pool from which only the most exceptional will crawl out- but that's not a hook in my parlance. But I think we may just be parsing words here.</p>
<p>Curmedgeon: Your post sounds identical to the conversation we had in my house in June 2007 ( and my d's scores are eerily close to yours!!!)...We did not choose to re-take anything, and , yes, her science score was an abberation.....</p>
<p>Some advice that we were given that helped us to decide whether to retake was the following and could possibly help the OP:</p>
<p>We were advised that since daughter was not a 4.0UW kid (more like 3.7), an extremely high SAT/ACT would possibly not be a good idea for the following reasons:</p>
<p>1) It may look like she was a lazy student, if you did not look at the context of her hs......</p>
<p>2) Like you said, can you be accepted with a 32 and 1470; Yes, and for the kind of schools my d is applying to it is near the 75% (no ivies)....</p>
<p>It remains to be seen whether we made the right choice to be done in June...So far, scholarships at safeties have been plentiful; whether it matters for her match schools...we'll see.....</p>
<p>Understand that if she was higher than 7% in class rank and had a much higher GPA, we probably would have approached this differently......</p>
<p>DS had 1480/1600 and 34/36 on his first round of tests. Good scores. But this math geek had a lowish outlier in his math ACT. He decided to retake. Ended up with 1500 and 35. A major change? I don't know. But I do not think it "hurt" him in any way.</p>
<p>Also, remember that the ACT score does not need to be sent, so you can parse the results any which way you want once you see them, then decide what to so.</p>
<p>Curmudgeon, I don't think we're too far apart in thought. My top stats vs. hook comment was really directed to kids targeting the super-selectives -- the toughest-to-get-into of the Ivies, MIT, and a few others I'm surely missing. Around here, anyway (an area of the country where most attend excellent, highly competitive public schools) virtually the only unhooked kids who get into HYPSM etc. are those with at least a 34 ACT (more likely 35 or 36), top 2 or 3% of the class, and great resumes. </p>
<p>I sigh when I read the many posts from kids with middling or spotty academic records who are hell-bent on Harvard or Princeton, and who believe that a great roster of ECs will get them over the hump. Those ECs won't even be on the table unless the academic threshold is met. And based on our Naviance charts around here, that academic threshold is awfully high for HYP and several others.</p>
<p>I don't have access to the online USNWR anymore (not U.G. anyway ;)) so I have to use collegeboard.com but here are the stats for 25/75: (Yale and CalTech are MIA)</p>
<p>Harvard- 31-35
Princeton-30-34
Stanford-28-33
Duke-29-34
MIT-30-34
Columbia-28-33
Penn-29-33
Brown-27-33
Cornell-28-32</p>
<p>A 32 puts you in the race (with the possible exception of Harvard and - just my guess Yale and Caltech). But like I said, the higher the score...the better the chances. </p>
<p>I agree, wjb. I think we are saying virtually the same thing.</p>
<p>I usually lop the bottom 25% off and recenter such that the 75th is the mean. Just my rule of thumb. Like I said, I'm pretty conservative with "chances".;)</p>
<p>BTW, there are only @2000 kids a year that hit that "35 or 36" out of @1.2 million test-takers. Not a large pool.</p>
<p>And before anyone starts thinking test scores alone will "do it" for you, take a look at the Duke numbers-29-34. My D had a 35, a literal "thumbs-up" from the interview, a pretty good app to boot, and was ....(drumroll)....waitlisted.</p>
<p>Yep, I've seen those numbers, and they have always perplexed me based on the results we see year after year in the high schools in our community. I guess like politics, all college admissions results are local. Best course of action is to figure out how kids in your high school have fared over the years.</p>
<p>IMO, the only thing having the "right" scores can do is get the student over one of the first hurdles at one of the selective schools. Which is why there is a range of scores among the accepted students and why many students with very high scores are not among the accepted.</p>