Score Choice
This spring, The College Board (“TCB”) unveiled its new Score Choice program, which TCB claims will help students to be less stressed when taking the SAT. I was reading some of the predictable outrage about standardized tests when I came across a page on the College Board web site (which has since been removed) that mollified college admissions people by assuring them that even if a student opts for Score Choice the college still can request a copy of all of the student’s scores, which suggests that any Score Choice may remain the college’s.
Colleges and universities that are on the record as rejecting the whole Score Choice concept are Stanford, Yale, Penn, Southern Cal, Pomona, Cornell, and others. Others, such as Harvard and the University of Chicago, have accepted Score Choice. Even before I learned how unevenly Score Choice was being received, though, I wasn’t sure what the big deal was about this new feature, anyway. Anyone who wants to cancel his/her score can do so within a certain short time period after taking the test. So, if you became sick during the test, you have had a few days to decide whether you’d just like to wipe the entire day off the books.
Hiding a score using Score Choice seems to be indistiguishable from canceling your scores, in that suppressing any SAT section score from a certain date suppresses all scores from that date (for example, you can’t hide the Reading and feature the Math and Writing scores).
Interestingly, for some time the usual practice in college admissions offices has been to cherry-pick the top “split” scores from a student’s different SAT administrations. So, on your application an admissions office might combine your January math score with your May reading score and your October writing score to produce a composite that the college, should it admit you, can then submit to U.S. News & World Report for the magazine’s annual rankings issue. The bottom line is that currently colleges are probably ignoring the very scores you might opt to suppress using Score Choice.
The only real benefit seems to be to takers of subject tests (if you’re a parent, think “Achievements”), in which one can suppress one or more of the up to three subject tests one can take on any particular date. However, rather than rolling the dice on multiple test dates, why not buy the official SAT subject test prep book and try a sample test before you go take it for real?
Clearly, there just don’t seem to be any good arguments left for why a competitive test-taker should wait until May to take his or her first SAT. Please see our recent post on when to start your testing.