Post might be a bit long since it gathers quotes from several sources and my particular situation is unusual, pls bear with me.
I realise this has been asked sporadically before, but the fact that Stanford has such an unusual policy (I’ve only heard of Carnegie Mellon and Yale doing this) that attracts a lot of very contradictory speculation really bothers me, and I’d like to know how the policy affects SAT strategy.
The official policy is:
- “Applicants should self-report their highest scores to date on the Common Application while their official test scores are being processed and sent to Stanford.” *
while at the same time…
“Applicants must submit all SAT scores and all ACT scores directly from the testing agencies.”
Which means they superscore, but for some reason you still have to send all scores for them to see, which might affect the admissions process. There’s wild speculation on this ranging from “be careful with every score” to “it’s just to prevent crazy people from retaking six times”.
Ostensibly, the only official reason that has been given for this policy by Stanford is "to discourage ** students from taking the SAT more than once or twice* as we believe that programs like Score Choice encourage applicants with resources to take the SAT excessively to improve their scores"*. This reason by itself seems pretty likely and although the admissions process may not be very transparent, I doubt they’d have a reason to lie to applicants about this, since this very explicit statement simply serves to tell the applicants what Stanford is looking for.
I’m asking because I got ** 790 CR, 780 Writing ** and ** 670 ** Maths during the December test. I prepared, but was basically in a haze for most of the paper for some reason (anxiety?), and I’m sure if I focus on Maths for the January test ( probably my final SAT due to my distrust of the new test), I’m likely to get an 800 for Maths and pull my Superscore to >2350, which is a lot safer than 2240 b**. My concern is that if I do focus that way and get something like ** 600 CR 600 Writing ** and 800 Maths then the person looking at my application might take slight offense at me gaming the system and have a negative perception.
I might be reading too much into this, especially since the point of retaking is to improve scores, TLDR; So will the person actually making my Stanford admission decision care it I’m kind of gaming the system by focusing on superscore instead of improving my overall, or are they just going to spend 15 seconds looking at my SAT results and superscore accordingly without a negative perception of me?