SAT scores Dilemma

NiceUnparticularMan
Mon, 19 Jan 2026 14:47:02 +0000

Yes, personally I would just submit it wherever I could.

If you are interested, this is representative of the sort of information I have seen:

This is coming from the Dartmouth white paper explaining why they were going back to test required:

home.dartmouth.edu

sat-undergrad-admissions.pdf

1333.58 KB

You can pick out where 1470 would put you on those charts, and it seems pretty clear that at Dartmouth, during their brief test optional years, it was a good idea to submit a 1470.

In fact, I think you can interpret the more-advantaged/not-first-gen charts as representative of applicants where Dartmouth usually felt like it got a reliable academic assessment from other sources like familiar transcripts and reliable recommendations. In those cases, submitting or not didn’t tend to matter much. But still, in your range, submitting helped move the admissions frequency a bit higher.

Then the less-advantaged/first-gen charts could be seen as more representative of applicants where Dartmouth is more often less confident about what the rest of their academic credentials imply, and for them submitting in your range clearly made a significant positive difference.

This was a large part of Dartmouth’s argument for going back to test required–they thought too many applicants with scores that would actually help them were not submitting. Other universities then followed often making similar arguments.

So I think that is really quite solid logic. If your scores were below 1400, then it would start being a little more risky to submit to a college like Dartmouth. But in the high 1400s, it seems like a pretty solid conclusion that if it makes any difference–and to be fair, this data suggests in most cases it wouldn’t make any difference, but sometimes–it is much more likely to help than hurt.

Of course that is just Dartmouth, but I suspect the same logic applies to most, if not all, of the similarly highly-selective US colleges.

So yes, I would submit your 1470 everywhere I could.