<p>Btsysmom,
I agree that in most cases, it won’t hurt, but I’m still surprised that in our privacy sensitive culture this is happening. Many students consent to have their “score range” released to colleges for recruiting purposes. The understanding is that these ranges are used to compile mailing lists, not linked to a future application since the student will apply and have official final scores sent when he or she is confident that the time and scores are right.
I think most people would be surprised and dismayed to learn that all their exact scores were seen by schools and plopped onto their application file without their consent. If you follow these boards you know that there are students who sometimes go to the trouble to put in special requests with their schools to have an ACT or SAT score removed from their transcripts if their schools include them so as not to have an embarrassing score follow them. In fact, many students choose to take ACTs based on the selling point that only the scores they choose (and not the whole history as with the SAT) can be sent. (There have been reports of students having their 7th or 8th grade ACT scores showing up on their FL apps with no annotation as such. Yikes!) If the schools only look at the best scores, then why are they taking the liberty of listing lower scores students on the app files when students never sent them? And what about the ethics of ACT/CB charging students fees to send scores to FL colleges when they already have them?
I especially suspect that many people would consider it an invasion of privacy to have their SAT and ACT scores released without their consent to schools they have no intention of applying to. To me, if this is what is going on, it should at least be disclosed to the students and parents… like your guidance counselor was kind enough to do for you.</p>