Testing Deciding Between the ACT and SAT: What's the Difference?

[DavidWhitbeck]

but generally schools don't just look at your SAT/ACT.

Huh? What planet do you live on? Most public universities look at sat/act and transcript grades first, the extras later. They have a lot of applicants and would prefer to boil them down to numbers to make the decision.

And most academic scholarship money is tied to the sat/act performance. My students take the act more than half a dozen times because that score is so strongly tied to university scholarships.

 

[Quincy]

My school (in Maryland) has this college tracking program that plots accepted people's SAT and GPA scores on a graph. Most of our graduating seniors go to UMD CP, so this should be helpful for you:

http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/4966/genscattergramphppo5.png
http://img518.imageshack.us/img518/4011/genscattergramphpgg3.png
http://img341.imageshack.us/img341/38/scatterlegendcd7.gif

A lot of people consider UMDCP as their safety school, but supposedly this year's admissions were pretty tough and some qualified people were deferred to spring enrollment.

You can see from the plot that everyone with a 2000+ SAT and 3.5+ GPA were accepted. To answer your question though, you should definitely take it again, especially if it was your first try. You'll probably do better the second time (with a lot of practice too).

Thanks a lot man, that is really helpful. My schools has the same college tracking program but only about 10 people from my school apply to UMD-CP so there's not enough information to make any predictions... Anyways, I guess I'll take it agian then, since all i did to prepare for this one was take two practice tests...

Edit: Btw, how many times did you take it & what did you do to prepare? And is 1530/2230 your superscore?

 

[awvvu]

Thanks a lot man, that is really helpful. My schools has the same college tracking program but only about 10 people from my school apply to UMD-CP so there's not enough information to make any predictions... Anyways, I guess I'll take it agian then, since all i did to prepare for this one was take two practice tests...

Edit: Btw, how many times did you take it & what did you do to prepare? And is 1530/2230 your superscore?

Yeah I did really well on the math and reading sections but only got a 670 on the writing. It's not counted as much anyway.

I took it twice, with a year in between and improved a lot. I did a lot of practice tests to prepare. I did sign up for the ACT too, but decided not to take it after receiving my second score.

 

[Quincy]

I took the ACT and got a 31 (English: 34, Math: 33, Reading: 31, Science: 27)... If I send both my SAT score and my ACT score, would the ACT score make up for the SAT score?

 

[uman]

The SAT is a complete bullgarbage test. I didn't study for it at all and got 2370 / 2400. The British system is much better.

 

[Quincy]

^ um.. ok, well how about responses that actually address my question?...

 

[Asphodel]

I took the ACT and got a 31 (English: 34, Math: 33, Reading: 31, Science: 27)... If I send both my SAT score and my ACT score, would the ACT score make up for the SAT score?

That depends wholly on the person reviewing your application and on the institution's policies (if any) on the topic. The only way to even hope to get a solid answer to this is to, you know, ask them.

If they don't require SAT, and your ACT scores are better, only send the ACT scores. Which should be obvious.

I never took the SAT since I thought that the concept of taking points off for guessing was stupid (but I also had a 35 on the ACT Science & Reading when I took it as a HS freshman, so no one seemed to be bothered much that I was stubborn about it). The PSAT was easy. The ACT was also easy. GREs, now GREs are something to worry about a tad.

 

[will.c]

Only subject GREs, though.

The GRE quantitative section is humorously easy, and your verbal score doesn't really matter, first because people don't do as well on the section (I got a perfect quantitative score which was 94th percentile, and a 720 verbal which was 98th!) and your score is taken comparatively, and second, people in technical graduate programs don't need to know what "vicissitudes" are, even if they live them every day.