Superscoring and Score Choice, school by school: how to send your best test record

Score Choice (College Board's official policy for the SAT, ACT has a similar policy) lets you decide which test administrations to send to each college. You can take the SAT five times and send only your best two sittings to one school, only your best one to another. The colleges that allow Score Choice never see the administrations you don't send. Superscoring is the policy a college uses for the scores it does receive. A superscoring college combines your best Math and best Reading-and-Writing scores across all the sittings you've sent, even if those bests came from different test dates. A non-superscoring college takes the highest single sitting and uses that. The two policies compound. A student with three SAT sittings, who used Score Choice to send only the best two, then has those two combined under superscoring, often ends up with a final reported score 30-60 points higher than any single sitting they took.

Almost every selective US college superscores the SAT as of 2026. The list is so long it's easier to cover the exceptions. Confirmed SAT superscoring (verified from each school's official admissions website in recent cycles): Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT, Columbia, UPenn, Brown, Dartmouth, Cornell, Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Rice, Notre Dame, Georgetown, Caltech, Williams, Amherst, Pomona, NYU, USC, Boston College, Boston University, Northeastern, Tulane, University of Michigan, UVA, UNC Chapel Hill, Georgia Tech, UT Austin (for both admission and merit), University of Florida, Florida State, Ohio State, University of Wisconsin, University of Washington, and essentially every other selective university. The practical implication: take the SAT 2-3 times, send your best sittings, let superscoring combine your best Math with your best Reading-and-Writing. The math is in your favor.

ACT superscoring is newer than SAT superscoring. ACT (the testing organization) only began officially calculating superscores in 2020. Most selective colleges now superscore the ACT, but the list lagged the SAT list by several years. As of recent cycles, confirmed ACT superscoring: MIT, Yale (yes, for ACT), Princeton, Harvard, Brown, Dartmouth, Columbia, UPenn, Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Vanderbilt, Rice, Notre Dame, NYU, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, Caltech, Boston College, BU, Northeastern, Tulane, Georgia Tech, University of Michigan, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA, Williams, Amherst, Pomona, UT Austin, University of Florida, University of Wisconsin, and most peers. The non-superscoring holdouts for ACT (verify in your application year): a small handful of state systems and a few selective schools still take the highest composite from a single sitting. Less common in 2026 than five years ago. When you order ACT score reports, you can opt to have ACT calculate and send the official superscore. Most students should do this.

A small handful of schools have historically required you to send every SAT or ACT score you've ever taken. The list has shrunk over time. Yale required all scores through the early 2010s, then moved to allowing Score Choice. Cornell at various points required all scores at certain undergraduate colleges. UPenn similarly. Stanford historically. The Self-Reported Score policy that many schools moved to (you self-report scores on the application, then send official scores only after admission) has further reduced the bite of any all-scores requirement. As of the 2026 application cycle, most all-scores requirements have been quietly retired. Almost every selective school accepts Score Choice. But verify each school in your application year, because the policy can sit in a school's fine print and surprise you. The practical implication if a school does require all scores: it usually doesn't matter much, because superscoring still applies to whatever you send. The admissions reader sees all your sittings but evaluates against your superscored best. A few of those sittings being weak doesn't sink an application that has a strong superscore.

Take the SAT twice if you're a normal-trajectory student aiming for selective schools. The first sitting (December of 11th grade or March of 11th grade) establishes a baseline. The second sitting (May or June of 11th grade) is your improvement attempt. Most students improve on the second sitting by 30-100 points. Superscoring picks up the best of both. Take it a third time only if (a) the second sitting fell short of your target and (b) you can identify what specifically went wrong. A student whose Math jumped 60 points on attempt 2 but whose Reading dropped 30 points has a clear case for attempt 3 to consolidate the Math while restoring the Reading. A student whose attempts 1 and 2 produced near-identical scores has no realistic case for attempt 3 to move the needle. Taking the test 4+ times is almost always a waste. The score won't keep moving up. Some admissions officers do quietly read 5 SAT sittings as a signal of bad judgment, even though the application policy says it's fine. The right cap is 3 SAT sittings (plus 1 PSAT/NMSQT) for an applicant aiming at competitive schools.

No. SAT and ACT can't be superscored against each other. They're separate tests with separate scoring scales. Colleges that accept both will let you submit one or both, but each test's superscore is calculated within that test only. What does work: submitting both tests if one shows your overall ability better and the other shows a specific section better. A student with a 1380 SAT (760 Reading, 620 Math) and a 33 ACT (with a 35 Math sub-score) can submit both to demonstrate strong reading via SAT and strong math via ACT. Most students should pick one test and commit. The marginal value of a second test is rarely worth the prep hours. The clear case for submitting both is when one test (almost always the ACT, with its strong Science section) reveals a strength the other test can't show.

Treat the SAT as a multi-sitting affair. Plan for 2 sittings, possibly 3, and let superscoring assemble your best record. Send only the sittings you want to send under Score Choice (verify the school's all-scores policy in your application year, but the default in 2026 is Score Choice everywhere). For the ACT, the same: 2 sittings, possibly 3, with ACT's official superscore service calculating the combined composite. The same Score Choice logic applies. Don't game the system in either direction. Don't take the test 6 times hoping the law of large numbers produces a fluke. Don't take it once and call it done if your score is significantly below your target. The optimal strategy is 2-3 sittings, focused improvement between them, and trust the superscore policy to do its work. Verify each school's official current policy at the time of application. The policies move slowly but they do move, and a school that didn't superscore in 2020 might in 2026, or vice versa. The school's admissions FAQ is the source of truth.