Monday, October 19, 2009

Thoughts after a week on the road

As you can see from the last post, I just spent a week in New England with my friends from JHU and NU. We had a wonderful time meeting students, parents, and counselors during our programs.

A topic that came up time and again was one I thought we addressed and settled already. However, the daily questions about it beg me to revisit the topic of

Score Choice

First of all, most colleges in this country have been looking at your best combination of SAT scores for many years. When Score Choice was introduced, it was advocating a more restricted version of what we already do. At UVa, our practices remain the same. Our system is programed to pull the best verbal, best math, and best writing scores of those on file. Readers don't see anything else. For the ACT, we see the best composite score and the subscores related to that best composite score (we do not recombine ACT subscores to come up with a new composite).

I realize that some students won't believe us and will still use Score Choice to hide their scores. I only hope that they do not feel the need to take the test more times.

I fear that that the seniors who are asking us about Score Choice are fixated on something that they don't need to worry about at this point. Send your scores and move on.