The College Board has announced changes in their method of reporting SAT scores to colleges in an attempt to offer students greater control over how their applications look to admissions officers.

The new policy, called Score Choice, will allow students to choose which of their SAT and SAT Subject Test scores colleges and universities will be able to see.

Score Choice will become available to high school students who take the tests in March 2009.

As of now, when a student sends scores to a school, every College Board test the student has taken appears on the score report.

According to the College Board’s Web site, the new policy is “designed to reduce student stress and improve the test-day experience.”

“I think that would definitely help for stress relief because it means with the exception of the financial burden of taking the test multiple times, there’s really no downside to it,” said sophomore John Hergenroeder, who took the SAT more than once when applying to college.

But Hergenroeder said that the new policy would have led him to take the test more.

“I’m not really the sort of person who gets super stressed out about tests, so I don’t think it would have been a big deal for me, but I think that I would have taken advantage of [Score Choice] just because I could have discounted the lower of the two scores,” Hergenroeder said.

While many schools including MIT, Harvard and the University of Chicago have supported the new policy, other schools do not, and still want students to submit all of their scores.

The Office of Undergraduate Admissions did not respond to phone calls and e-mail requests. Washington University, like most other schools, uses test scores in the context of a prospective student’s entire application.

Some schools are discouraging students from using Score Choice, saying it might cause prospective students to hurt their admissions chances because schools vary in how they use the scores in admissions decisions. Several schools have a policy of only considering a student’s highest score, while others combine the highest scores from each subsection of the test.

Georgetown University’s Web site says that students must send all scores from all of their SAT, ACT and SAT Subject Test sittings.

According to the Web site, “access to your full testing profile enables the admissions committee to fully and fairly assess your individual strengths in comparison to the entire applicant pool.”

Yale, Stanford and Cornell universities will still require students to submit all of their scores.

Opponents of the policy argue that it will only further benefit wealthier students, who can afford to take the test multiple times. A single sitting of the test costs $45, not including the cost of reporting scores and other optional services—some students’ families hire testing coaching services, which can cost thousands of dollars.

“If you only have to submit one score, you can obviously keep taking it as long as you can afford it, and the test fees continually go up,” Hergenroeder said. “So I can see it getting expensive to take the test four or five times.”

The ACT already allows students to pick what reports to send. The College Board plans to alert students if any of their schools require all tests to be sent. For universities, it is often difficult for schools to tell if students have really sent all of their scores.

If a student chooses to send a score from a particular test date, all subsection scores are sent. Students cannot send individual subsection scores. Students still see all of their scores on reports sent to them. Score Choice only affects scores sent to colleges and universities.

There is no additional cost to send scores using Score Choice and students may still opt to send all of their scores.

The College Board offers fee waivers to qualifying students, but imposes limits on how many times a student can use the waivers.