My junior son has been working with an SAT/ACT tutor since the beginning of summer and is scheduled to take them both this month. We just met with a college advisor that recommends that we do not take both tests as some colleges will ask for copies of all tests taken. Is this true or can you decide which test scores to share with the colleges that you apply to? Thanks for any advice you can give!
Beginning in 2009 after College Board (the SAT company) adopted “score choice” switching from automatically sending all the test scores it had for a test-taker to colleges to instead allowing a test-taker to choose which tests to send to colleges, many colleges, in reaction to that change, adopted a rule requiring applicants to submit all SAT test scores, and a number of those also adopted a rule requiring one to submit all ACT scores, and even all SAT subject test scores. There are still many who believe a lot of colleges require all test scores. Moreover, there are even college-related websites that still so believe that and provide long lists of such colleges without realizing or acknowledging that their lists are dated…
The reality is that every college in the nation that adopted such a rule in 2009 or somewhat after has since dropped any such “all scores” rules, to the point that there are now only four colleges left in the nation that have an “all scores” requirement:
Georgetown: requires all SAT, all ACT, and all subject test scores.
Cornell: requires all ACT if you send any ACT (you can choose to just send SAT) but allows one to provide whichever SAT tests and subject tests one wants to provide.
Yale and Carnegie Mellon: one must submit either all SAT or all ACT tests, or all of both if you choose to send both, but you can choose which SAT subject tests to provide.
For other colleges you can choose which tests to provide. However, there is a caveat. You need to know what your high school puts on your official high school transcript sent to colleges. There are still many that put all your test scores on the transcript, so choosing not to provide tests through the testing agencies may accomplish nothing, except to prove you attempted to withhold tests when ordering them sent by the testing agency. Thus, before you can know whether you can safely withhold any tests, you need to check what your high school does.
S20 applied to 10 schools. and only 1 of them requested all test scores sent. It was University of Maryland college park. For the rest we got to pick. Some schools wanted the highest reading and highest math so they could superscore. Others wanted the highest one sitting.
^University of Maryland no longer has any all scores rule. Many colleges do recommend submitting all scores, or state you should list your highest section scores in the application if you have multiple tests, because they superscore, but those suggestions do not create any actual requirement to provide all scores.