How bad is a 2290?

tokenadult
Fri, 15 Jun 2007 07:33:25 +0000

you know they see a difference between a person who scored a 2400 his first time and between another who took the test 10 times and used a superscore



Admission officers even at Harvard see few of either such case in the applicant pool, and they reject students who fit either case in some instances. And mostly, no matter what you say, they don’t care about this issue. Harvard, and every college, has a blanket policy about how to consider scores of students who submit however many different scores on their College Board score reports. Harvard describes its blanked policy as “You may take tests more than once; we consider only your highest scores” in an admission office publication, the Official Register of Harvard University.

The admission officers are more aware than many people who post on CC that

a) a fairly large number of students who report just one score are NOT first-time test takers, because they took the test as middle-school-age students for Talent Search (and those scores disappear from the permanent record of scores by default) or because they cancelled a score from an earlier administration (there are threads about canceling scores here on CC after each SAT test date),

and

b) exactly how much test scores are really meaningful in the context of the overall application.

The admission officers care about test retakes a LOT less than most students (and many parents) guess they do, in large part because they have a more nuanced way of considering test scores in the admission process. This is especially hard to understand for some students whose parents grew up in other countries (where test scores are sometimes the sole criterion for deciding who gets into universities), but I’ve been to lots and lots of college information meetings, including three of Harvard’s, in the last four years, and have read a large number of the current books on these issues, and have specifically asked Harvard’s and other admission officers about this,

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/showpost.php?p=4198038&postcount=1

and can confidently say that if you can clearly explain why you did it on your application (why did you?), then you shouldn’t have to worry about test retakes.