Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums Identification, Testing & Assessment Keep or discard 7th-grade SAT scores?

Scores were necessary for our child to gain access to opportunities for early college classes. Our copy would not have sufficed - the scores needed to come directly from the College Board. I would keep in mind that even if you don't plan to have your child graduate from high school early, they may end up wanting to take a summer course or single course while in high school.

If a kid did very well in SAT (e.g., meeting SET requirements) under 13, it raises the expectation of admission officer. I feel that the kid need to have significant follow-through in high school years, like doing well in AMC12, AIME, winning Intel award, Davidson fellows, etc. Verbal kids have less opportunities for national recognition, but winning some writing awards would be good. On top of that, the kid need to follow-through with a perfect (or near perfect) final SAT in the junior year.

It is just some extra pressure that you may or may not want your child to face.

Really, they look at the highest scores period. Often the lower scores may not even appear on what the admissions officer is looking at. They really don't have time to spend time worrying about the kid's 7th grade SAT scores. Also, anyone who understands testing knows that the difference between a 750 and an 800 can be very little - a question or two. Not significant enough to worry about.

Thanks to everybody for their thoughts on this. We decided to keep the scores, based partly on the advice of our DYS family consultant and partly on the idea (hope?) that ds will probably be able to come close to matching the math score whenever he takes the SAT again -- his only prep this time around was a single practice test, on which he scored 760, so I don't think the 800 was a fluke.

I also agree with ptp's point, which I've seen made on College Confidential, that above a certain level, small differences in subtest scores just don't carry that much weight with admissions committees.

Apologies for reviving an old thread, but DD14 just got her SAT scores back and I'm looking into this.


Can you share your thinking on why keeping scores would be a bad thing, especially if they're very good. I allowed her age-12 upper-1300's scores to be discarded, but upper-1500's at age 14 is above average for even the elite colleges and I don't see a downside. With so many applicants to elite schools in the ceiling range/mid-to-upper 1500's, I would think showing that ability at an early age could be a differentiator. Similar to differentiating among 780-800 Math scorers with high AMC/AIME scores.

A 1560-1590 as a junior supplemented with 1550-1570 in 8th grade should compare favorably to just a 1560-1590 as a junior, no?

DD12 just scored 1290 and I'm planning to keep her scores, not the least because I'm not sure when I'll be able to convince the school to test her again, and with her special needs stuff I don't think can really test through a test center. And I think we'll need those scores over the next couple years for camp and program applications.

I kept my son’s because the 750 reading at one month after 12 was impressive. His math wasn’t bad but he was only half way through algebra 1 and he isn’t a mathy kid so it was good at 560 but not in the broader scope of what is really impressive. If both his scores had been in the high 500, low 600 I wouldn’t have kept them

Not sure when I am going to have him take it again.

Our DD scored a round 1400 (740M/660R) last year when 12. We don't plan on asking for them to be kept. I am not sure that admissions people really care how someone was doing before even high school.

Cranberry does raise a fair point but it to me it just shows what a low ceiling the SAT actually has.

With less than 0.03% hitting the high score and less than 0.2% being within 50 points of the high score, from the latest detailed data released by College Board, I don't think it's a low ceiling. This isn't an instrument to differentiate among PG students, it's applied to the entire population.

0.03% is about 3.44SD, or an IQ of 152 on a 15 point SD. I'm sure many of the tools we discuss have ceilings in the 150 range.