Every year around this time, as our seniors finish up, we try to think about the tasks students can do at home with their parents if they are running out of hours.
I have posted before about how it’s really hard to mess up application submission (AFTER the entire application has been throughly proofread, of course - just talking about the act of clicking submit and paying for the application fee, etc). It’s so straightforward that it would be next to impossible to submit by mistake.
What I do fine to be pretty tricky, though, is the process of submitting official copies of SAT scores through the College Board website (ACT score submissions are easy).
Keep reading about the submission process to learn the SAT misstep a lot of families make by accident!
Getting Started
After students sign into their College Board account and select the option to submit a score report, the website instructs them to add their colleges to the list.
This isn’t too difficult - just confirm that you have the correct school names (one year we had someone submit her SAT score to American University of Paris instead of American University, but we caught it after reviewing the confirmation email!).
Score Recipients
The next screen takes you to a list entitled “My Score Recipients.” This is where things go wrong: So. Many. People quickly proceed to the next page after reviewing the list of schools.
What they don’t realize is that the list defaults to sending ALL scores to each school. You have to manually change this option for every single school in order to be able to choose to send your best scores!
In the screen shot above, do you see the yellow arrow next to SMU, pointing to “All Scores”? The entire column looked like this before we began working our way down the list school by school.
We started with Boston College at the top of the list, and clicked the “Choose Scores” link next to each school to manually change our selection from the “All Scores” default.
See how the orange arrow shows that Princeton is set to receive “Selected Scores,” along with the three schools above it? You want the entire list to look like this before you proceed to the next step in the score submission process.
Selecting Scores for Submission
But first, let’s look at what happens after clicking “Choose Scores.” You will be taken to a page where all of your scores are laid out for you.
Assuming the school practices score choice and allows you to submit your best scores, you should figure out which test date, or combination of test dates, results in the best Evidence-Based Reading and Writing and Math scores. That’s what you want to send. The others should be toggled to “No.”
In this particular case, the student had a 760 in math each time she took the test (she is so smart!). But we do not want to send her December 2020 or March 2021 test date, because she did better in Evidence-Based Reading and Writing on the May 2021 test date. In this case, we would toggle the December and March test dates to “no” and the May 2021 test date to “yes.” Then we would proceed ahead and repeat for the next school.
Don’t Forget to Double Check!
After making all of these selections, when all of the schools are set to “Selected Scores,” you can proceed to the next screen. At this point, click the plus sign next to each school just to confirm that you actually selected what you intended to select. We clicked through each one here to make sure that it listed the May 2021 test date ONLY!
Pay and Finish Up!
Whew! The hard part is done. At this point, you can proceed to the next screen and enter your credit card information. Don’t forget to wait for the confirmation that shows that the scores were successfully submitted before clicking out.
Common Questions
Is it better to send the scores before or after application submission?
The truth is, it doesn’t matter at all. If you already know that you are done testing, and you already know your college list, you may as well go ahead and send the scores to get this step out of the way. But I would highly recommend waiting until after your list is 100% set, or this can become confusing.
Is it a good idea to rush scores?
No! Never! Because scores are now sent electronically, the rushed (i.e. sent through FedEx or similar) score reports will almost always arrive slower than ones sent normally. Strange, I know, but trust me on this and don’t rush your scores.
Is it necessary to send score reports if self-reporting scores on the application?
For some schools, no, it is not. For example, UVa is very clear about the fact that you can just self-report your scores on the application and follow up with the official score report if you enroll there, for fact-checking purposes. And this will save you some money, as the score reports cost $12 per school. But many other schools DO require official reports, and there’s a lot of conflicting information out there in terms of who does and who doesn’t. After a lot of back and forth last year with inaccurate information, my preference is for students to just go ahead and send official reports everywhere.
Is it necessary to send scores to test-blind schools?
Technically, no, as they don’t consider them in the review process. But human nature is human nature, right? If there is any remote chance that someone will see their high scores, even if they aren’t technically considered, I’d rather a student pay the $12 to send them and hope for the best. That’s why I had this student send her scores to UCLA.