Undecided STEM with interest in CS, engineering, and math. 1500 SAT superscore (800 math, 700 verbal), 4.0 unweighted, 4.4 weighted [CA resident]

Chance Me / Match Me
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From MIT’s admissions office, the bottom 25% of the verbal section of the SAT was a 740.

image: Snip of table from MIT Admissions with the test range of admitted students (25th and th percentiles) with SAT Math 780, 800, SAT ERW 740, 780, ACT Math 34, 36, ACT Reading 33, 36, ACT Composite 34, 36
image: Snip of table from MIT Admissions with the test range of admitted students (25th and th percentiles) with SAT Math 780, 800, SAT ERW 740, 780, ACT Math 34, 36, ACT Reading 33, 36, ACT Composite 34, 36792×401 18 KB

This thread discussed MIT’s decision to go back to test required, with comments from someone who works in admissions, and there were various posts in the thread about the non-trivial importance of the verbal section of the SAT and the requirements for humanities and social sciences coursework at MIT.

I’m generally not a big proponent of retesting to try and get a higher score when one’s scores are already excellent. But, for MIT, your son’s verbal score may be sufficient in and of itself to preclude him from an offer of admission (though more than 95% of applicants are rejected, so odds are that your son would still be rejected from MIT even if his verbal score does surpass the 700 mark). Thus, if MIT is a school that your son is really interested in attending, then it could behoove him to study and retake the SAT to improve the verbal score.

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