Students who take the SAT Reasoning Test after March 2009 will be able to choose which of their scores will appear on the official score report sent to colleges. Dartmouth Dean of Admissions Maria Laskaris '84 said this change would not have a significant impact on the way that Dartmouth reads applications.
The new score-reporting feature will carry no extra cost. If students take the test multiple times, they will be able to select how many of the attempts to report on their official transcript from the College Board. Students must report all section scores from a single test sitting.
Laskaris said Dartmouth admissions officers primarily consider a prospective student's highest possible SAT score during the application reading process and will combine sections from multiple sittings, if applicable. The result becomes the applicant's official recorded score.
"A reader might note that an applicant took the test multiple times, but it's not a positive or a negative," she said.
Critics of the change to the score-reporting process have said the new policy may disadvantage lower-income students who may be unable to afford to take the test multiple times, and admissions officers will no longer be able to see if a student's score results from multiple attempts that may have been supplemented by test-prep courses.
Laskaris said she did not anticipate having to make changes to account for a possible new source of bias because of the holistic way admissions officers consider applications.
"We recognize that standardized testing in general is an unfair measure," Laskaris said, adding that test scores are among many aspects that application readers consider. Readers attempt to account for biases such as socio-economic status, she said.
The College Board currently grants testing-fee waivers to some low-income students. Students who qualify for waivers may take the test free of charge once during their junior year and once during their senior year. The SAT is administered seven times per year. Fifteen percent of test takers elect to repeat the exam at least once, according to the College Board.
Liz Masi, a rising senior at Convent of the Sacred Heart college preparatory school in Greenwich, Conn., said she would have taken the SAT more times if the option to conceal her multiple attempts were available.
The College Board changed its policy in response to feedback from test takers who said they felt pressured during the test administration because they knew that their scores would be permanently recorded, Laurence Bunin, senior vice president of the SAT told The Los Angeles Times.
"Students were telling us the ability to have more control over their scores would make the test experience more comfortable and less stressful," Bunin said.
Masi said she felt that knowing her SAT scores would be automatically included on her record may have negatively impacted her performance while she was taking the test.
"I was much less nervous taking the ACT," she said. The ACT has long permitted students to select which of their scores to reveal to colleges.
A similar option called "score choice" was previously available for SAT II subject tests. If testers elected to pay for the service before taking the test, they could suppress that result when they requested a score report. The College Board eliminated score choice in 2002 in response to criticism that the service unfairly favored wealthy students.
