After talking with parents this week and reading a number of blog posts, it appears that there is still a great deal of confusion about the SAT Score Choice policy. Nancy Griesemer does a great job of detailing the problems created by score choice in her College Exploration blog. In fact, you can here is a link to her most recent blog post, “More Headaches From Score Choice.” You can also visit the College Board’s web page to get more information on their policy. In this post I would like to tackle the common questions I receive and misconceptions that I have overheard.
What is Score Choice?
Score Choice is a new policy by the College Board that allows you to choose the scores that you send to the colleges. This differs by the test type. For the basic SAT Reasoning test, you can choose to send only the scores from your best “sitting” or, you can send all the scores. Well, what does this really mean? Many people are under the impression that y ou can choose your best reading, math, and writing scores from any sitting and the colleges will only see them. No. That is not the case. You can choose to send all the scores from one day, or time you took the test, but not individual scores. This policy is different for the SAT II’s, or subject tests. There, if you use score choice you can elect to have the colleges only see certain scores.
Why did they offer Score Choice?
Ostensibly, they are offering Score Choice as an option that will help relieve stress for students, since they do not have to worry about “bombing” the test. Some have theorized that they offered it to help stem the loss in market share to the ACT, which has always offered score choice. I do think that it does help some students since they know they do not have to worry, since if they bomb it, they can opt not to have anyone see those scores, however, it has also added more confusion.
What are the down sides to Score Choice?
Most colleges do not parse your SAT scores in great detail. That is, they do not care how many times you have taken the test. In fact, many schools like to see that you are trying to improve your score and trying to take it more than once. The only schools that seem to care how many times you have taken the test and look down on your scores if you have taken it too many times are the Ivy League schools and other similar highly competitive institutions. The problem with these schools is that if you opt to use school choice (well, that is if they accept score choice, since schools do not have to subscribe to the program. For a list of individual school policies click here) then they will assume you took the test more than twice and you bombed it at least once, negating the perceived benefit of using score choice.
O.K., so now you opened a new can of worms. How many times is too many to take the SAT?
As with most issues related to college admissions, the answer to that question is, it depends. For the highly selective colleges, one application reader for an Ivy League school told me that more than twice she frowns on (she also said that if she sees a student from the north who submits an ACT, she assumes he or she bombed the SAT). However, many schools like to see that a student takes the test more than once because it demonstrates that the student is trying to improve his score.
Tags: SAT preparation, SAT score Choice