SwaGGeReR

As I am sure many of you know, CollegeBoard offers to send your SAT scores free of charge to four colleges of your choice. Regularly priced at $9.50 each, it sounds like a money-saving move. However, is it a good idea to commit to having your scores sent before you even know what your scores will be? If you do bad and the scores are sent, won't it make you look bad and potentially ruin your chances of getting in?

SwaGGeReR

~SwaGGeReR

angrygoldfish

I'm pretty sure that you can change what schools (if any) you want to send your scores to up until a few days after the test. You won't know exactly what your scores were, but if you prepared well and were self-aware of your performance during the test, you should have a pretty good idea.

And if you got a really bad score? Then you'd have to take the SAT again, right? And all your SAT scores go on each score report, so they'd show up anyway. I'd just go ahead and send them.

bclintonk

Not so. Under the College Board's new Score Choice policy, you can decide which SAT scores you want to send. A few colleges are saying they want to see all of them anyway, but so far that's only a handful of school. Sending them without knowing what they are may be a money-saving move but possibly risky unless you're absolutely confident your scores will come out on the higher end of the school's medians. (They say they only look at the high scores, but I don't really believe them; consciously or unconsciously, a weak SAT score has got to influence their "holistic" view of an applicant's file). I'm advising my D, a HS junior taking the SAT for the first time Saturday, to wait and see what the scores are before sending them. The schools she'll be applying to don't have application files on her yet anyway, so there's no point making them keep track of these scores, especially since we don't know if they'll help her. I'd rather pay the few extra bucks after we see the scores and decide they're satisfactory, or have her re-take the test if she wants to try for higher scores later.

jkaufman

I absolutly agree with bclintonk, I mean what's 9.50 if it means a better chance of getting into the school of your dreams? I would definitly wait, those adcoms are definitly taking in all of the information before making a decision, and you don't want a bad SAT score holding you back.