Answered: Can colleges see all of my SAT attempts or can I hide scores I'm not proud of?

I say it all the time, but this one is a hard and fast, “it depends,” because it actually varies from school to school. Some colleges will ask to see all of your SAT scores, while others won't. If a college does request all of your scores, it's because they want to get a sense of your full academic profile. They're looking at your entire performance on the SAT, not just your most recent score.

You should also know that some colleges use what's called superscoring. With superscoring, they take your highest score in each section across all of your test dates and then combine them to create a new, higher composite score. So, if you took the SAT three times and got 720 on Math one time, 710 another time, and 700 last time, the college would factor in just the 720 for their superscore.

I'm hesitant to "definitively" list which schools might follow each practice since this is the type of policy that often changes from year to year—especially now that so many schools are completely reconsidering testing as an accurate measure of student performance and going test-blind or test-optional. Your best bet is to study hard and wait to take the exam until you feel like you're as ready as you can be so that you get your highest possible score in the fewest attempts. Then research the specific practices of the colleges you're interested in before making the decision to re-take closer to application time.