(Disclaimer: This covers HotSpot VM only)
As Alexey states, the actually used tenuring threshold is determined by the JVM dynamically. There is very little value in setting it. For most applications the default value of 15 will be high enough, as usually way more object survive the collection.
When many objects survive the collection, the survivor spaces overflow directly to old. This is called premature promotion and an indicator of a problem. However it seldom can be solved by tuning MaxTenuringThreshold.
In those cases sometimes SurvivorRatio might be used to increase the space in the survivor spaces, allowing the tenuring to actually work.
However, most often enlarging the young generation is the only good choice (from configuration perspective).
If you are looking from coding perspective, you should avoid excess object allocation to let tenuring work as designed.
To answer exactly what you asked:
When an object reaches its JVM determinded tenuring threshold, it is copied to old. Before that, it will be copied to the empty survivor space. Objects that have been surviving a while but are de-referenced before reaching the threshold are cleaned from survivor very efficiently.