If you take the ACT, you have control over which scores are submitted to which colleges. It’s a practice the ACT has had since its inception. Now the College Board, following the ACT lead, is introducing Score Choice. If you want to get more information on Score Choice, go to the following link: http://professionals.collegeboard.com/testing/sat-reasoning/scores/policy to get a copy of the fact sheet, and a PowerPoint presentation. Score Choice launches this March and will be available through the College Board’s website or customer service department.
Since over 85% of students sign up for College Board tests on-line, in all likelihood, that’s where you’ll first encounter Score Choice. When signing up for the March 2009 SAT or Subject Tests, you can select the option “Choose Scores” next to each college you want to send a score to; that’s Score Choice. If you’ve already taken SATs prior to March, those scores will fall under the control of Score Choice. However, if you don’t select “Choose Scores,” all your scores will automatically be sent to all your schools. Assuming you’re using Score Choice, you’ll get a new screen for each school receiving your score. The screen will contain information on how the school reviews SAT scores. For example, if one of the schools is Yale University, the screen will mention that it uses the “highest sections score practice.” You’ll then find listed below this information, your list of SAT test dates with the high scores for each section highlighted. Finally, before sending scores to your college, a summary screen appears for your review.
Actually, this isn’t the first time the College Board has gone to an elective score reporting system. From 1993-2002, any student taking the SAT Subject Test, at the time called SAT II, could elect to report only the top scores to the colleges they were applying to. The College Board elected to dispense with this option because a lot of students were forgetting to send their scores and missing their admissions deadlines. With Score Choice, should you forget to send scores, you will automatically receive an email notification from the College Board. Additionally, the College Board also felt that ending the practice would be fairer to lower income students who took the tests less frequently. (“SAT Changes Policy, Opening Rift with Colleges,” by Sara Rimer, www.nytimes.com, 31 December 2008).
With any change, and this is no different, comes controversy. William Fitzsimmons, the dean of admissions at Harvard, who is also a member of NACAC, which recently released a scathing report on the value of standardized tests, likes the idea of students being able to select which scores to submit, “Score Choice will help defuse some of the pressure and give students a sense that not everything is riding on the tests, which really is the case. ”This view, however, is not shared by a number of admissions officers at several other highly selective colleges including Stanford, Claremont McKenna, Pomona College, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Southern California. All of these schools want all the scores. Timothy Brunold, the USC director of admissions, mentioned in the 21 June 2008 LA Times: “We would prefer to see a student’s entire score history, because it gives us the context of how students earned their scores.” Bruce Poch, vice president and dean of admissions at Pomona College, is even more vocal on this point, “My own view is that tests are a transcript. I don’t get to choose which grades appear on a transcript any more than I get to suppress a driving record from an insurance company.”
Score Choice is a calculated marketing ploy by the College Board to give it a more student focused feel (something its arch-rival, the ACT, has been nurturing since its inception). Regardless, anything that might reduce the gut wrenching pressures of the admissions process, and the specific stresses of standardized test performance, is welcome. It’s good that the College Board is trying to score points with its choice market, the student.
College Board’s Score Choice Launches March 2009