<p>Do you guys think preparing for competitions like the USAPHO, USABO, and USNCO are more important, or preparing for standardized tests like SAT/ACT are more important? A unique achievement in a competition might be able to make up for poor scores, but don’t college admissions people always look at test scores first? Any thoughts?</p>
<p>if you’re good enough to do well in those competitions, you’ll probably get 700+ on the SAT anyway, so why bother?</p>
<p>the science olympiads are definitely way more important to the SAT and ACT in terms of weight. In fact, with the increase in purchases of test prep books, the SAT and ACT don’t really have that much weight anymore AS LONG AS you are not an outlier. Harvard admissions Dean William Fitzsimmons even quotes that “beyond a certain threshold the actual numeric value of the score is negligible. We are just looking for the range to be met” Ironically enough, most people with 2400 SAT and 36 ACT tend to NOT get into top colleges because of their lack of other important admissions factors, such as extracurricular activities, competitive interest, and character.
Thus, there is really no use in retaking a 2250+ (or 2300+) or 34+ on respective standardized tests.</p>
<p>Given a certain threshold, there are probably over five thousand applicants that lie within this benchmark (maybe ~300-500 perfect SAT, 500-800 perfect ACT). A little insight on this debate is offered when you look at the number of people qualifying for the six respective olympiads: ~400 (physics), ~500 (biology), ~100(linguistics), ~250(math) ~8000 (aime), ~1000 (chemistry, although the prestige associated with this usually depends on what region you are from - schools in new jersey have MUCH harder, local exams than schools in say Kansas)), ~500 (computing, summing together all the months of gold competitors).</p>
<p>And like umerical said, if you are good at competitions, you generally tend to be brighter, and can probably get 2100+ anyway. SAT doesn’t really take much practice - one can easily get better after maybe 20 hours of practice - whereas olympiads usually take hundreds of hours to be good at.</p>