July 29, 2004
A: FROM MENTOR CAROL TOMAN IN IL
My daughter will be starting college this fall so this question is
really fresh in her mind. Here's what she has to say:
the reason the early decision rates are higher
is that the *people* who apply early decision are generally better
qualified. they would get in anyway. there is no advantage on
actually being accepted when you do early decision -- the only advantage is
that if you *are* accepted, you can forget about applying to your other 5
or more schools -- which is a whole lot of hassle.
I'm not sure about the SAT scores; you should probably contact the
admissions office and ask them their policy. This is especially good
because when they finally do review your application (either regular
or early decision), they will see that you called before and that you are actually very interested in their school.
If you aren't accepted early decision, you will either be denied or
moved to the regular decision pool -- in which case you've lost no
ground. I do believe (but I'm not sure and you'll have to check with
your school) that my friend who was moved to the regular decision pool
at Harvard redid her SATs for exactly that reason -- but she redid
them *after* she was deferred. I don't know if that was because she didn't
want to spend the money if she didn't have to or if the school
wouldn't accept the new scores until she was officially in the regular decision
deadline camp.
I wouldn't apply early decision unless you are absolutely positive you
want to go to that school -- and I think that might be hard to know
for sure, since I wasn't able to make my own decision between 4 possible
colleges until days before the deadline.

Don't count on higher SAT scores unless you've done some extra
preparation in the meantime -- the SATs are engineered to give you
about the same score on different versions of the test if your knowledge
hasn't changed. Good SAT prep books: Princeton Review, Up Your Score!
(<-- funny and shorter than Princeton Review. Princeton Review SAT is
tailored to average students, Up Your Score is tailored to above average
students. Both have good features.)