<p>I took the PSAT at the beginning of this school year (junior). Since, I've been receiving mail from a lot of colleges. Some quite unheard of, some pretty good to my standards - NYU, Xavier, Oberlin. All of the letters are just telling a little bit about the school, and include a post card for you to send back if you'd like more information or a little pamphlet. They all also say they received my information from College Board, thus the PSAT helped get my name out a little bit.</p>
<p>I'm sure most of you know about this stuff, so is it that the colleges are actually interested in me, or do these colleges just send these out to a large group of people?</p>
<p>Colleges buy the lists from the College Board, and send info to all the students who received similar scores to you. It's not that they are interested in you per se, but you are probably within their standards, and it is worth your while to investigate further.</p>
<p>They send the info out to everyone scores decently on the test. </p>
<p>And...it's a little flattering at first, but it gets annoying FAST. Once it gets annoying, you can ask the schools to take you off of their mailing lists.</p>
<p>Yeah...my sister is a sophomore and just got letters from 10 different colleges one day this week. Anyway, idk how they determine score cutoffs. Like I know people that score in the 190's on PSAT's and were getting mail from HYP.</p>
<p>Like World Changer said, it's flattering at first, but then it gets really annoying.</p>
<p>Yes, the colleges are interested in you -- in you submitting an application. The more good students they have to choose from, the better class they can put together (and the more selective they look).</p>
<p>But what I think you mean is has someone at the college taken note of your score and said "gee, historybuff looks like a good student, we'd like him to come to our school". No, this didn't happen. In fact its a pretty good bet that nobody at the college has ever heard of you. They hire the College Board or a marketing company to send out these brochures, even if they are issued under the name of some dean at the college.</p>
<p>All getting one of these means is that something matched what they told the College Board to screen for. It could be your major, your GPA, your test scores, even the zip code in which you live. This is just the start of the letters, put aside a box for them (and a separate box for the stuff from WUSTL).</p>