Okay so this bothered me when I was applying to colleges. SAT scores don’t matter that much after a certain point. I had a 1500/2190 and I currently am a Columbia junior. A 1500, 1450, 1470 or any other score in the vicinity of 1400 is enough to be seriously considered by these schools. Focus on other parts of your application/life and stay out of this revolting culture of panicking about score differences as minuscule as 10 or 20 points. It isn’t a useful or healthy way of living your high school life.
I beg to differ but to each his own.
Meanwhile, on the Pitt merit scholarship thread, people are noticing that the 36 ACT applicants were notified first with generally full tuition awards, except in engineering. Then a couple of weeks later the 35 ACT applicants were notified with generally lower level awards.
So again, while tippy tops may not care, others apparently do.
^ Good point, but as you mentioned, you are comparing apples to oranges. Pitt, while a great school, is a state school and like many other state schools is primarily stats driven (rather than holistic) in their application review process. Given the size of Pitt, it is issuing 16,500 acceptances (compared to 2,193 for Columbia) and getting acceptances out before Thanksgiving so having a largely stats based evaluation process (and grabbing high stats kids with full scholarships well before most schools’ RD dates) makes a lot of sense.
However, that is not the main topic for this thread. As the OP originally stated:
“Will a 1500 (730 CRW/770 M) New SAT score be enough to get into schools like Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, UVA, and Harvard? Should I retake, or will that be enough?”
I fully agree with @IWillKillForMIT who is speaking from experience.
Therefore, for a Senior in high school who has a 1,500 on his/her SAT and applying to tippy top holistic schools, I believe that most people would NOT recommend retaking the SAT (in December and/or January) and focusing instead on first semester grades, applications/essays and other activities that keep the average high achieving Senior busy. I think it is important to emphasize that many kids applying to top private schools is a rigorous IB programme or taking lots of AP cpurses. As colleges in the RD round will see first term grades, this is more important that another 30 - 50 points on a last-minute SAT.
@londondad I misread his post I assumed he was a junior but if he’s a senior applying to holistic schools such as these then yes rounding out his entire application is more important
You’re in the running, but you’ll have a better chance if you retake. It’s best to get a score within their 75th percentile average if possible.
@joyce1517 sounds like good advice!
@londondad you said first semester grades are more important than 30-50 points… but isn’t that a ton of points? the difference between a 1500 and a 1550 is massive
@BucketsUCSC there is no such thing as a score that is safe. That is misleading. There are scores that are competitive and scores that are not as competitive for top schools. As discussed, that is different for merit where there are often published score minimums.
@Sportsman88 so you wouldn’t agree that somewhere around a 1550 is more competitive then a 1500
@Starforward I disagree. For a highly competitive top US Uni with holistic admissions, the difference between a 1470 and 1500 or 1500 and 1530 is negligible.
@londondad that’s interesting… I always thought the value of just a few extra points on the sat steeply increases for top notch schools
I have heard that once you get over 1400 your decision will probably depend on the other parts of your application.
@BucketsUCSC You didn’t use the word competitive in your original post. You referred to 1500 as not safe and 1550 as a safety net. No Ivy, MIT, Stanford, etc. is a safety unless you have a parent who is a world leader
I think below 1500, one’s odds decrease but it’s a holistic process. Too often I read posts that think holistic means that if you have lower scores and “great ECs” that you can get in. That’s true. But it also means you have a 1600/4.0 and not get in.
And as noted, the way the common data set reports numbers, we don’t know what the 75 percentile is. They never give the composite on SAT that I can find for Harvard. 75% is 800 for each area but as noted, that doesn’t mean every, or even most, students scored 1600/2400. For ACT, 90.02% were 30-36. This is too broad of a range. I wish CDS would break out at least 30-33 and 34-36.
TIFWIW, but I’ve read on here 33 ACT is good enough to not be ruled out. 34 is better. After that, work on other parts of your portfolio. Prepscholar correlates a 33 to a 1490-1510 and a 34 to 1520-1550.
So, 1500 is competitive. 1550 a little more so. Neither is safe.
@Sportsman88 That’s really interesting… It’s funny how a 1500 is known as a universally good score, but its a completely different world in Ivy admissions where a 1500 is mediocre
My son faced a similar dilemma. He scored a 33 on the ACT (equivalent to a 1500), and wondered whether to take it again. He was not sure what to study, and was thinking about business or engineering. He retook the ACT and scored a 36. What was the result? He was still not accepted to HYPS. He was accepted to Michigan, Vanderbilt, Georgia Tech, Rice and a few more. The higher ACT score probably made a difference for a few of them. What else? His friends congratulated him because his name was published in the local paper. And he met with the president and dean of one of his scholarship schools when he visited.
When we looked on Naviance, this admission outcome was exactly what was expected in his ACT/GPA band, with the exception of HYPS, which was randomly distributed in the corner of the upper quadrant, (meaning the ACT/GPA were not the deciding factors). I’d look on Naviance for your colleges of choice and see if would make a difference for you.
@TooOld4School well schools like Michigan and Vanderbilt are the types of schools I’m looking at! Do you think the jump from a 33 to a 36 made the difference for those schools?
Vanderbilt is very stats driven. In our Naviance chart, we can see a clear cutoff between auto-admit (34+, assuming strong GPA), and likely reject (32 and lower).
I apologize if I missed it but are you a junior? It doesn’t hurt to take again but don’t spend exorbitant hours studying. Take ACT and SAT once in the Spring and then judge which or if to take one in the Fall. Don’t forget subject tests are required for some schools.
My D has a 33 ACT and 1530 SAT. She scored 33 twice on ACT and stopped. She took SAT a second time just to get a superscore and happened to hit 1530 with both sections being new highs. She really never did any test prep because she didn’t time given her ECs and academics. You have to balance all three - and GPA is more important than a perfect test score.
@hebegebe Wow… That’s crazy… Likely reject for 32 and lower? Does this count for SAT scores that are converted to ACT scores?