Are high schools allowed to have your ACT/SAT/AP test scores on your transcript? I was under the assumption that the scores belonged to the test takers. I never authorized my school to publish my test scores, are they allowed to do this? Currently my transcript has all of my ACT, SAT, and AP scores on it, and I only took the SAT once and did poorly and was not even planning on sending it.
You can ASK them to remove them. Any ACT or SAT score that was done for state education evaluation was likely paid for by the school and they own it, not you.
So if I paid for the all of my own tests and they were not for state evaluation purposes then most likely I can get them removed?
You have to check with your particular high school. Including test scores on the transcripts was, many years ago, done by most high schools, and most colleges accepted scores on transcripts rather than requiring scores sent by the testing company. Over the years, many high schools stopped putting test scores on transcripts sent to colleges and it is not clear whether the majority still do; also, it is now a continuously shrinking minority of colleges that accept test scores from your transcript .
You do not really “own” the scores in the sense that you can force the high school to take them off the transcript. The high school is generally prohibited from releasing the information in your high school record that may go on your transcript other than your identifying information (name and address) to any outsider absent your permission. However, if you request the high school to send a transcript to a college to which you have applied, that request automatically constitutes the legal permission the high school needs to send everything from your high school record that it usually puts on a transcript. If you wonder how the test score got to be part of your high school record, that actually resulted from another act of waiving your privacy rights . By identifying your high school to the testing agency in your test registration, you gave the testing agency the legal permission it needed to send the test scores to your high school to become part of your high school record and thus “owned,” so to spea, equally by the high school…
In ot6her words, a high school may upon your request remove test scores from the transcript even though it otherwise usually sends them, but if the school refuses to do so – for example, it may not want to make exceptions to what it usually sends out --you may not be able to force it to do so. You could in that situation perhaps bring a courl action to force the high school to remove test scores because the privacy/permission issues I mentioned above have not definitley been decided by courts. However, to do that would cost a lot of money in the hiring of lawyers and you would probably get a final decision, after the appeal of any trial court decison made, about a year or more after you file the suit.
Thanks for the advise! I’ll have a talk with my school administration and try to convince them. If they say no, I’m not interested in taking legal action against my school, I find that a bit absurd LOL. Worse case scenario the AO’s see I my SAT score but will realize I only took it once and primarily focused on the ACT