I’ve written before about colleges and universities that have moved to a test-optional admissions model. These institutions do not require students to submit their scores for admission purposes. Instead, they evaluate students on other factors like their in-class performance and involvement outside of school. However, many students will choose to submit their scores to schools and I advise that if a student’s score falls in the middle range of a school’s accepted freshmen profile from the previous year, they probably should. This data is pretty easy to find with an internet search.
There are a few ways a student might submit their score to a given college. At some institutions, students are allowed to self-report their scores. More commonly though, the institutions want to receive the scores directly from the testing services. When students register to take an SAT or ACT exam, they can choose to send their scores to up to four colleges. They can also choose to send their scores after the test. This is probably the most common way scores are sent. If a student takes a test as a junior, they might not even be certain which schools they are applying to, so by the time senior year rolls around, most of them will end up logging back into their accounts with the testing services and sending their scores. The testing services will send four score reports for free. After that, the SAT charges $14 for score reports. The ACT charges $18.50.
I recently encountered a potential trap one of my students fell into involving score reporting. She took an SAT in the spring of her junior year. At the time she registered, she requested her score be sent to four colleges including a large southern university that is test optional. At that time, I’m not sure she had a solid picture of which colleges she would actually end up applying to. She took the SAT again in June and solidified the schools she planned to apply to over the summer.
She did end up applying to that large southern university, but based on that school’s profile, she decided to apply there without her test scores. However, she forgot that she sent them her score when she registered for the test back in March. Generally, if a college or university has a score they are going to evaluate it, even if they are test optional. Or, as I’ve had colleges tell me before, “once we see something, we can’t unsee it.”
The only test score the college received was the March one. They never received a score from June because the student never sent it. Her March score was a bit below scores of most of the other freshmen admitted the prior year, but she has a great GPA and a very impressive resume. She was deferred from the university in the first round of decisions they released and we have to wonder what impact her scores had on that decision—scores she sent months before she applied and well before she had her head wrapped around a complete strategy for college admissions. This might be a cautionary tale about sending scores as a student registers for a test or before forming a firm application plan.
