[ajwinn]

Excellent question. I’m of two minds here. As a high school student, I too struggled to get great test scores. I took the SAT four times, which finally resulted in a score that could get me scholarships.

Did I become smarter? - I sincerely doubt it.

Did I become less likely to fail out of college? …Seems unlikely, but I don’t know.

As an admissions rep, I understood that high scores, whether SAT or GPA, are certainly both proxies for a prediction: If I admit this student, are they going to fail out?

Unknown: It actually might be the case that students who get private tutoring are less likely to fail out because their parents can financially endure them struggling to repeat failed courses. I’d be interested to see a study on that.

[hackinthebochs]

Did your final score more accurately reflect your abilities? Probably. Can everyone increase their score by hundreds of points by repeated testing? Probably not.

[scarface74]

Who knows? My first score in 10th grade without any specific SAT prep made me eligible for the only well known school I applied for my senior year - Georgia Tech. By the time I was doing specific prep for the SAT in 12th grade, that was only to get the award for the highest SAT score.

By the time I started prepping , I had already accepted a scholarship for a local college with the plan on doing joint enrollment after 3 years.

I didn’t do that either. I was tired of college after three years and just graduated the next year and started working. I didn’t really care about GT.