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Score Choice permits students to send only their best overall score from a given test date. So students can take tests repeatedly with no apparent penalty. Indeed, according to guidance counselors, many high-school juniors are signing up to take next month's SAT, just as they did this month. The juniors are doing so because they figure it's a free swing at a good score, and they can always re-take the test in March or May.

There's one catch. Colleges can opt out of Score Choice and require applicants to report every SAT score. And some colleges have now decided to do so, NEWSWEEK has learned. Stanford, Cornell, Pomona, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Southern California told NEWSWEEK their applications next fall will demand all scores. Other elite schools, including Harvard and the University of Chicago, say they'll honor Score Choice; many, such as Yale and Princeton, say they've yet to decide. A few, such as Colby College and Williams, say Score Choice is irrelevant to them because they already cherry-pick the highest individual math, verbal and reading scores from among multiple tests.
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"Railing against" Score Choice, wrote Bill Conley of Johns Hopkins, implies top schools "really are dissecting scores at a level we publicly claim not to." If "a student submits a single best sitting of 2320," he asked, does anyone really care "how low were her other score sets?" In an admissions subculture fixated on the SAT, the unkind answer would seem to be yes.