Colleges see the administrations you chose to send, and nothing else. Not the sittings you withheld, not a score you cancelled, not a count of how many times you have taken the test. Almost every anxiety students bring to this question is about information that never leaves your account.
This page is about the receiving end. If you want the mechanics of sending, including the fees and the nine-day free window, that is how to send SAT scores.
The short version
| Do they see... | Answer |
|---|---|
| Administrations you sent | Yes |
| Administrations you withheld | No |
| A score you cancelled | No, it is destroyed and reported to nobody |
| That a cancellation happened | No |
| How many times you sat the test | Only the sittings you sent |
| Your total and section scores | Yes |
| Your percentile ranks | Yes |
| Which questions you missed | No, and neither do you |
Score Choice is the whole mechanism
Score Choice is on by default. When you order a report you pick the administration it covers, so each college receives exactly the sittings you selected for it. You can send different sittings to different colleges.
The limit is not technical, it is contractual. Some colleges ask applicants to submit every score they have as a matter of institutional policy, and a small number require it. College Board does not police that on their behalf, which means compliance is between you and the application you signed. Read each college's own testing page. The practice varies more than general advice suggests, and it is one of the few places where the honest answer really is "check the specific school".
Where a college superscores, sending more sittings can only help, because it takes your best section score from each. A weak sitting alongside a strong one is not the liability students imagine. We worked through which situations that actually changes in SAT superscoring.
What is on the report itself
A college receives your total out of 1600, your Reading and Writing and Math section scores out of 800 each, and percentile ranks putting those numbers against a reference population. That is the substance of it.
What does not travel is anything question-level. The Question and Answer Service, which used to return the questions alongside your answers, remains discontinued, and test-prep professionals asked for its return at College Board's 2026 briefing without receiving a commitment. So no admissions officer is looking at which algebra question you missed, because that report does not exist for anyone, including you. That absence is the subject of its own piece: the SAT will not show you the questions you missed.
What we could not verify
College Board publishes detailed guidance for higher-education institutions, but we could not find a public, field-level specification of exactly which data elements are transmitted in an institutional score report. Reasonable-sounding claims circulate about additional fields, self-reported questionnaire answers and the like, and we are not going to repeat them without a source.
So treat the table above as the verified core rather than an exhaustive schema. If a specific field matters to your decision, the reliable route is asking the admissions office directly, and they generally will tell you.
The two questions actually worth asking
Most students arrive here worried about surveillance, when the real decisions are simpler.
First: should this college see a score at all? At a test-optional school that is a genuine judgement call, and it turns on where your number sits against the middle of their published range rather than on anything about the report format. That is a separate decision with a real method behind it.
Second: does this college require all scores? If yes, the Score Choice question disappears and you are simply sending everything. If no, send what helps.
Neither question is answered by knowing more about the report's internals. Both are answered by reading the college's testing page, which takes about four minutes per school and settles the matter in a way that speculation never will.
Frequently asked questions
Do colleges see how many times I took the SAT?
Only the administrations you send. Score Choice is on by default, so sittings you withhold are not visible to the college and there is no attempt counter transmitted alongside the scores you do send. Some colleges ask applicants to submit all scores as their own policy, which is a matter between you and the application rather than something College Board enforces.
Can colleges see a cancelled SAT score?
No. A cancelled score is destroyed and is not reported to any institution, or to you. There is also no indication on anything a college receives that a cancellation took place.
Does the college see my percentile as well as my score?
Yes. The report includes your total out of 1600, your two section scores out of 800, and percentile ranks placing those figures against a reference population.
Do admissions officers see which questions I got wrong?
No. Question-level data is not transmitted, and it is not available to you either, because the Question and Answer Service remains discontinued. Nobody receives a breakdown of which individual questions you missed on a real administration.
Is there a published list of exactly what is in the score report colleges receive?
Not one we could locate publicly. College Board publishes guidance for higher-education institutions but does not appear to publish a field-level specification of the institutional report. If a particular data field matters to your decision, asking the admissions office directly is more reliable than the claims that circulate online.
Should I send a lower score alongside a higher one?
Usually it does no harm, particularly where the college superscores, since superscoring takes your best section from each sitting. The exception is a college that explicitly requires all scores, where you have no choice, and a small number of schools that state they consider the full testing history.