should I take the SAT a third time?

emberjed
Thu, 12 Jul 2012 07:54:42 +0000

You can raise your Critical Reading score, but you’ll have to do a lot of practice. Don’t beat yourself up when you get a question wrong; just relax and see if you can figure out why the correct one is correct and why the wrong one distracted you.

This coming year, though, I’d focus on keeping your GPA at least as high as it is (if you get straight A’s you’ll raise it to around a 3.8); at the most selective colleges in the U.S., many applicants have 4.0s. As unfair as I think it is (because high school teachers vary widely in their grading and class difficulty, both within and among high schools), SAT performance is often viewed as secondary to GPA.