Superscoring Across Sittings

A single sitting gives you one Composite built from the scores you got that day. But sit the test twice, and your best section scores rarely land on the same day. Maybe English was strong in March and reading was strong in June. A superscore ignores the day and just collects the best version of each section, then averages those bests into a new Composite. That is why two unremarkable sittings can combine into a Composite neither one actually produced.

The mechanism is simple once the Composite itself is defined. With the Composite now built from English, math, and reading, superscoring just means: take the highest English score you've ever earned, the highest math, the highest reading, from any sitting, and average those three numbers. Nothing else feeds in. So if sitting one gives English 22, math 28, reading 24, and sitting two gives English 26, math 25, reading 27, the superscore pulls English 26, math 28, reading 27. Average those three: 27.0.

The catch is that a superscore is not an official, universal score. It's a calculation a college chooses to make, or not. Some colleges superscore automatically, some only on request, and some only look at your single best sitting instead. So the number itself is always real arithmetic, but whether it matters depends entirely on the policy of the place reading your application. That makes superscoring less a rule of the test and more a strategy for deciding how many times it's worth sitting it.