Do most students aiming for selective colleges take the SAT and/or ACT in junior or senior year?

[brantly]

A really good student with a high gpa but lower than expected standardized test profile, is perhaps a highly organized, very motivated kid who works really, really hard who has great memorization skills, writes great papers, follows all the rules in class, participates a lot in class discussions and in general studies a lot.

This was my kid. She graduated in the top 5% of a very highly competitive public HS. Every final grade every year was an A or A-. She took eight APs and got mostly 5s, some 4s. Her highest SAT after four tries was 1350 CR-M; 2040 CRMW. She tried the ACT once and got a 29. She was expecting above 2100 and maybe closer to 2200. She couldn’t crack 700 on any one section. I still can’t understand how someone who achieved a 5 on the AP calc AB exam couldn’t crack 700 on the math SAT (close – 690, but still). I talked about it in this thread last year: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/1647058-very-high-gpa-middling-sats-p1.html

I really didn’t know if she was “just” a grinder or if she really was very smart. Fast forward to this semester, her first in college. She is on track for a 3.8 to 4.0. In one weeder class that about a quarter of the students have dropped, she has an A thus far. So . . . still don’t know what happened with those SATs. Her score, although very good, was not commensurate with her GPA.