A bubbling mistake?

Applying to College
1

<p>I took the May SAT II in chem and thought I did fine. I’ve been taking AP Chem all year. However, when I got my scores back, they were really low (630) relative to my expectations all the practice tests I had taken. I finally came to the conclusion that I had made a bubbling mistake, which is highly probable. I retook the SAT II in June on Saturday and thought I did pretty well. </p>

<p>Assuming I did well on the June SAT II, should I try to explain my low initial score? Will it extremely fishy to have wildly disparate scores a month apart?</p>

2

<p>Why would it look fishy?</p>

<p>There are lots of reasons why a student might get a lower score than expected on an exam – a bubbling mistake, a distraction in the room, feeling unwell, being nervous. If you take the exam again and score much higher, I think most people would assume that you had some sort of problem the first time and that it didn’t recur.</p>

3

<p>I don’t think it would look that bad. Especially if your other scores are a lot higher, they’ll probably just assume something went wrong.</p>

4

<p>If you rescore you exam by requesting hand scoring…will they fix the bubbling mistake/catch it?</p>

5

<p>I’m pretty sure that if I messed up the actual filling in part, it won’t help me. What likely happened is that I left one blank and filled in a long set of answers wrong, in which case, hand scoring will not affect my score.</p>