We see a lot of misinformation and general confusion about whether or not students should submit the free score report that the SAT allows when they register for the test.
For SAT score reporting, the college board will give you an option to select up to 4 schools to a send free score report before you take the test. At Mindfish, we advise against this because your family may not be set on which schools you are going to shoot for, and if a student doesn’t get his or her best score, s/he couldn’t reverse the sending process. So it often can be disadvantageous to preselect schools to submit to. Furthermore, students can’t superscore (i.e. take the highest score from each section of multiple tests) if they choose to submit the free score report.
So how/when should you submit SAT Scores?
After you or your student takes the SAT, (regardless of how many) you can log into the SAT portal and click on “sent scores.” Then if you choose “send additional scores” you can pick particular SAT’s to send to a given college. If you don’t choose to send a score to a particular school, they CANNOT see the score. You will have to order scores for each college that you or your student applies to (if you qualify for a fee waiver, you will be able to apply for one in this scenario as well), but this way you can send exactly the scores you want to specific colleges you want.
As a final note, colleges don’t often place a lot of weight on how early a student sends in their scores as long as it’s before the deadline (it often doesn’t help anyone’s chances of admittance). So don’t feel any pressure to submit your score “early.”
It can seem tempting to want to submit a score right away or even before the SAT — especially if it’s a free score report. But it’s important to be patient and send your score report to the exact schools that you want, while representing your best test taking efforts.That way, you’ll maximize your chances of attending your dream school
