Did way better on my 3rd SAT attempt than I did on my first two attempts.

Test Preparation
1

I am a junior in High School this year. I will explain my journey with the wonderful SAT.

I go to take the SAT in October of 2014. (Start of my Junior Year) and I am way overconfident because I think I was above studying for some standardized test. I ended up scoring 1780. (690 math, 550 reading, 540 writing) I was obviously not happy with this score. I decided maybe I needed to prep a little bit. I bought a blue book and thought that maybe taking two practice tests would be enough. I improved somewhat on the SAT in December but not by very much. I ended up scoring 1850. (720 Math, 580 Reading, 550 Writing)

I then decided to really analyze how I could best improve my score. I realized that my knowledge of English grammar would definitely have to improve. I realized that I needed to expand my vocabulary and learn better test taking strategies for reading passages and I did. And I learned that I needed to review geometry because that was the majority of the question types that I was missing on the SAT math. I read The SAT Black Book by Mike Barrett. (Which helped a lot with the reading passages) I read The Ultimate Guide to SAT Grammar by Erica Meltzer (Which really helped a lot. This was probably the most helpful of all the prep books) and I just reviewed some of the math on my own and read some of the SAT Math advice on this website. I used Direct Hits 5th edition to improve at the Sentence Completion questions. I took the SAT earlier this month and my score absolutely skyrocketed on my 3rd attempt. I scored a 2160 this time. I got 800 on the math, 640 on the reading and 720 on the writing.

So what I am asking though is that will schools (particularly UC Schools) look at my 2160 as a complete fluke or will they look at it the same way they would look at any other score of 2160? I know a lot of schools say that they look at each students best SAT Score but I’m not sure that’s entirely true. Can anybody explain how my scores will be interpreted by admissions officers?

2

UC’s accept the highest SAT score at one sitting. They will see you increased your total scores each time. Good job!! My neighbor’s son took the SAT 6 times to get his desired score of 2280 and he was accepted to UCB.

3

@Gumbymom Do you know what he got on his first time though? If he got like 2000 on his first time that doesn’t look nearly as bad to UCB(One of my top choices) as it would for me with my first time of getting 1780.

4

They only consider the top score, so it doesn’t matter what you received on an older test.