Do colleges know if you choose to use the free score reports, which means the student agrees to send the scores before knowing what they are?
If colleges do know that you choose to do that, does it look better to the college?
I don’t believe they know (but may guess based on receipt date), and certainly don’t care. You don’t get brownie points for sending them in sight unseen.
Ok thank you very much. I remember with the ISEE exam many schools wanted the scores automically, and knew the difference if you waited.
Some colleges require that you send all scores, so if you may apply to these colleges, it makes sense to send your scores automatically. There’re fewer such colleges now, but when my S took his tests, including his subject tests, he sent all his scores unseen to four such colleges. However, he never applied to three of them (because of his acceptance in the EA round), and was accepted by the other one (but chose not to go). He also only took all the tests only once (including all three subject tests in one sitting). So we don’t really know if any of these helped, but they certainly didn’t hurt.
Keep in mind that AOs will spend 10-15 minutes tops on an application. They don’t have time for this minutiae.
That said, unless cost or timing is an issue, or your target college is one of the few requiring all scores, I personally see no benefit to the student to sending scores sight unseen.