Quote:
(tokenadult: )
Harvard admission officer who visited his high school [said] that an applicant should report ALL applicable scores, that is all scores asked for in application questions. He said that cherry-picking which scores to self-report was viewed as dishonest and was more harmful to an application than simply listing, say, a few low scores along with higher scores.
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Note that this directly contradicts the idea (which you have posted many times) that Harvard is interested only in the highest SAT scores, because it merely "superscores" the SAT and the other scores may as well not exist.
To answer calmom's question as to how such a situation could arise, suppose that an applicant took SAT-I, got low scores and submits a higher ACT score in lieu of the SAT-I, without reporting the SAT-I results on the application (since ACT is standing in for those). The problem is that Harvard also requires SAT-II subject tests, and the SAT-I results are included on the score report. So they would discover the unreported scores.
If Harvard were interested only in one's highest scores, and they certainly have a conversion of ACT to SAT that they use, this "deception" wouldn't matter, since the lower scores might as well not exist. But it does matter.
Harvard indicates at the college representative meetings (among other places) that it is interested in as much information as possible. It is the least likely school in the United States to pre-empt any piece of information, such as the lower test scores, from ever entering into consideration.
By the way, the strategic implication of the above is that applicants who might have low SAT can avoid this problem by taking ACT first (many times, if they think it helps). They can then opt out of ever taking SAT-I if the scores are high, and submit a clean SAT-II report.