<p>qazqay recently posted a comment by a Stanford admissions rep that reinforces my impression that (generally speaking) they do not like to see retakes of high SAT scores.</p>
<p>A useful question to ask yourself: What are the probable SAT scores of the people working in admissions? What will be their likely impression of a student whose total is 100+ ahead of theirs on the first try, and then retakes? </p>
<p>Again, this is purely an informal impression, but I don’t think that one could outscore the Princeton admissions office average by 100 points–don’t think there’s that much room above their average. Based on their blogs, I’m pretty sure that one could outscore the average of the admissions representatives at MIT by 100 points (and most likely the OP already has). This probably goes for Stanford as well. For H and Y–haven’t encountered enough of the admissions reps to know.</p>