I am starting another series of posts aimed at helping students worry less about the SAT and ACT. Obviously these tests are important and obviously they are stressful, so I don’t mean to imply that you should not worry at all and some amount of worry is healthy (as a motivating force). But I tutor many students who worry excessively and really put undue and unproductive pressure on themselves. There are a number of reasons not to worry as much about the SAT and ACT so I want to spell out some of those factors in separate posts. Some of what follows here was covered in a previous post on superscoring, but I wanted to reframe this in the context of giving students some tangible reasons to worry less, so this is the first in a series of posts aimed specifically at that.

The first and perhaps most important consideration is that no single administration of the test needs to matter that much for a variety of reasons. Students tend to get fixated on the total score that they want to achieve, but schools really look at the section scores individually and although they have a sense for how high the total is, that is not their main concern. For example, lets say that you are applying for engineering programs. In that case your Math score is probably more important to schools than the Reading and Writing scores. In fact, a higher total score with a lower Math score is probably less advantageous than a slightly lower total score but higher Math score. If you believe that you just need to get a 2000, its probably more important to think about the individual sections and how they end up breaking down. For example, you could have a 2000 with a 600 Math, 700 Reading, and 700 Writing. But if you are applying for an engineering program, you would probably be better off with a 1950 with an 750 Math, 600 Reading, and 600 Writing. So it helps to not be fixated on the total score that you think you need but on the individual section scores.

Secondly and related to the above, many schools (including most private schools) will superscore the SAT, so you don’t need to have a great performance all around on test day. If you go in there and nail the Math section, but perform poorly on the Reading and Writing sections, all is not lost! For many of the schools that you apply to, that Math score is there to stay because even if it comes down on future tests, if the Reading and Writing scores come up they will just cherry-pick the highest section scores from the different tests and that will be your final score. In fact, many schools will never even see those lower scores because it is not likely the case that the admissions officers sit there with all of the score reports and superscore them by themselves. That is probably done by an administrative assistant beforehand or by a computer so in many cases the admissions committee will never even see those scores. There is an interesting blog by the Dean of Admissions at UVA that demonstrates how the process actually happens in their case – basically a computer automatically superscores the applicant’s scores so that although the admissions officer can see that different scores may have come from different test dates, they care neither about the number of times that you took the exam nor the lower scores that you got on those other tries!!! Please click on the above link if you would like to read more about it and see what their admissions officers actually see when they are evaluating applications.

This leads then to the next reason that you shouldn’t get too stressed about the outcome of a single exam: you can pretty much take the SAT as often as you want!!! There are some people who will disagree with this and say that you should take it a maximum of 3 times, but given that many schools will not even see all of the times that you took it and that a computer or administrative assistant will essentially provide the admissions officers with the highest scores, there is no reason to worry about how many times you take it or about how you perform on any single test. Although I am no expert when it comes to the admissions process itself, I do work with and have relationships with several admissions consultants who do have insider experience in the admissions process and with some of the students who we have been working with together, they have advised that the student take the SAT a 4th or even 5th time to try to improve at least one of the section scores. In these cases the admissions consultants (some with experience on admissions committees) have advised me that it would be to the student’s advantage to take the exam again and that the student should not worry about how many total times he or she will have taken the test.

If you accept that, then there really is much less pressure on any single exam. The way I think about is to use this basketball analogy. One of the most stressful and pressure-filled experiences is having to take a foul shot when the game is on the line: make the shot and your team wins, miss the shot and your team loses. You have only one chance. That is real pressure!!! Well, imagine if you were on the foul line and you could basically take as many shots as you wanted until you made it. Much less pressure!!! Obviously that is not a perfect analogy and you cannot take the SAT 20 times, but I have had students take it 5 times and get into great schools.

One more related thing to point out is that the SAT has score choice, so for most schools you can even suppress scores that you don’t want the schools to see. Some schools ask that you send all scores, but this does not mean that they will look at all of the results and hold the lower scores against you. In many cases they want all of the scores so that they can do what they want with the scores and superscore in the way that they wish. In other words, some students may not send a particular score because of a very low section score, thus preventing the college from using a potentially high section score that occurred on the same exam, and some colleges want to prevent you from doing that. If schools have all the scores, they can do with them as they wish. If you are interested in knowing what the policies are at a particular school, see this College Board document that lists the policies for every school that accepts the SAT (and again remember that “All Scores” does not mean that they will not superscore).

So there are a couple of important takeaways here. First, stop obsessing over the total score that you want or think you need. Think instead about the sections as separate entities and realize that it is unlikely that you will achieve your best section results on a single test and almost certainly not on the first try. In some cases you a lower total score with the right breakdown on the sections scores might be superior to a higher total score. Realize too that there are many opportunities to take the test and no single experience is going to make or break it for you – there are lots of do-overs on the SAT!!! You can retake the test many times and you can even usually suppress unsatisfactory scores. So there really are reasons to not worry as much and not put as much pressure on yourself and this is just the beginning. In the coming weeks I will follow this with additional posts that lay out even more reasons not to worry!