<p>I'm a junior, and my counselor told me that it would be a waste to not utilize the four free score reports that the College Board lets you sent. Apparently I only have until March 18th to do this, which means that I wont get to see my scores before choosing whether or not to send it. I have two main questions:
1. Should I send the scores to National Merit yet? Based on my PSAT score, there is no way that I won't be a semi-finalist, but would they just trash my report if I sent it to them before they asked? I don't want to pay for it later, but at the same time, I don't want to send it now if they aren't going to keep it (or even worse, if I don't get over the cutoff score- I doubt that will happen, but I don't think I did as well as I was hoping for today).<br>
2. If I send it to a college that I eventually intend to apply to, will they keep it?</p>
<p>Yes, you’ve identified the problem: by the time you have seen your scores, you can’t send them for free. For this reason, my daughter didn’t use her free score reports. We didn’t think of this decision as “a waste”; we thought of it as…the price of controlling the flow of information.</p>
<p>If colleges get your scores, they’re going to hang onto them. (When they get the first thing from you–whether its test scores or Common App or something else–they’ll open a file for you, and when more stuff comes in, they’ll add that stuff to your existing file.) In most cases, however, if you score higher later and send those scores, colleges will base their admissions decision on your highest score for each section.</p>
<p>I don’t see any reason not to send the scores to NMSC, but I don’t have a lot of expertise there.</p>
<p>Thanks for responding! I honestly don’t know how I did today (could be up to a 2400 if there is a generous curve AND I didn’t make stupid mistakes AND I got the ones that I guessed on right, or it could be 2100 [or lower] if all of those forces go against me). Because of this, it’s kind of hard to know what to do…</p>