Should I Apply to MIT with a Low SAT/ACT Score? [740M, 670RW]

So obviously this is not going to be exactly what you want to hear, but . . .

MIT last reported 6717 International applicants. It accepted 129. So it had to reject 6588 as it was accepting the 129. So how does it do that?

Well, we know one thing MIT is looking for is outlier math ability. The SAT Math is not necessarily super important per se, but MIT has suggested in the past their reported SAT Math is so high just because the sorts of math outliers they are looking for typically find it easy to get a very high SAT Math score. I’m not qualified to judge your math credentials, but part of your problem is going to be reconciling your SAT Math score with their normal expectations.

And then something a lot of MIT applicants may not understand is MIT takes very seriously that its undergrad program is part of what is sometimes called the Liberal Arts Tradition. Most of the top STEM undergrad programs outside the US are not, but MIT is.

And so no matter what you major in, MIT is going to require you to get a broad liberal arts education. And among other things, it will do that by requiring you to take HASS (Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences) classes. And MIT teaches those HASS classes at a very high level, and so it expects all its students to be well-prepared to thrive in high-level HASS classes.

So MIT’s reported RW range is ALSO very high. Not quite as high as its Math range, but for the SAT its middle 50% is 740-780, and it is 69-72 for ACT R+W.

OK, so I think Internationals, and really all MIT applicants, should understand that one of the easiest ways for MIT to get down to a manageable pool of applicants is to eliminate almost all of those applicants who might be competitive by their normal standards in terms of Math/STEM, but are not competitive by their normal standards in terms of Reading/Writing/HASS.

Of course you can still apply to MIT anyway. I just think you need to understand your challenge will be to convince them you are BOTH the sort of math outlier they are looking for AND the sort of Reading/Writing/HASS student they are looking for, despite not having SAT scores they would normally expect from such applicants.

And since described that way that is an extremely daunting challenge, if you want to study in the US, you should make sure to apply to other US colleges that do not have the same expectations as MIT. Indeed, for a variety of excellent US colleges, your test scores might be just what they are looking for in an International applicant–at least if you can pay what they charge, which is a whole other topic.

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