Privacy Statement

Scope

This Privacy Statement applies to the programs and services we provide to individuals and to schools, districts, state departments of education, colleges, universities, and other organizations. This Privacy Statement also explains how we use and protect the personally identifiable information you share with us when you use sites and mobile apps owned and operated by College Board.

This Privacy Statement links to other areas where you can learn even more.

• Residents of specific states and countries may find more information consistent with their applicable law in our Jurisdiction-Specific Privacy Supplements: California, State Consumer Privacy Laws, and EEA, UK and Brazil.
• Privacy policies for specific College Board programs give further information about their data collection, use, and disclosure practices: Program-Specific Privacy Policies and other Supplemental Resources.
• You may also read our Data Privacy Principles, which guide our overall data privacy practices.

Personally Identifiable Information Collected

College Board provides programs and services to individuals as well as to institutions. The information we may collect varies and depends on who we are serving and in which programs and services they are participating.

The types and categories of personal data collected are further specified in Program-Specific Privacy Policies, Supplemental Resources, and our agreements with educational institutions, which may include contact information; demographic information; information to verify an individual’s identity; information for test administration such as their disability; device information; information about students’ interests, educational experience, and plans for after they graduate high school; educational institutional affiliation; or information about professionals’ role(s) at an educational institution.

Information collected from individuals.
College Board collects personally identifiable information that you provide to us and about your use of our programs and services.

Individuals do not need to create an online account to view and use most of our website. If you are a student, you may create a “student” account, and if you are an educator, representative of an educational institution, or exam administrator (exam coordinator or proctor), you may create a “professional” account. 

• Student Accounts: Students need a College Board account to register for tests directly with us, view and send scores, personalize their web experience, or use certain tools on our site, such as the college and career tools on the BigFuture pages of our site. Student account creation requires acceptance of Legal Terms for Students. Student accounts are personal to and belong to the student who creates the account and serve as the student’s gateway to various College Board programs and services.
• Professional Accounts: Education professionals need a College Board account to perform certain tasks or save personalized information. Professional account creation requires acceptance of the Legal Terms for Educators and Institutions. Professional accounts are created by professionals acting solely in their capacity as authorized representatives of their respective institutions and are not for their personal use.

For any programs and services requiring payment for which a credit card is used, credit card information will be collected and processed by a third-party payment processor. A tokenization approach is used through which your full credit card information is not stored in our systems. 

Information collected from other sources.
College Board collects personally identifiable information from schools, districts, state departments of education, colleges, universities, and other third parties. When College Board has an agreement with a school, district, state department of education, or higher education institution to provide assessments, financial aid services, and/or other educational services, it only collects students’ and educators’ information as necessary to provide those services. 

We may receive information about you from other sources, such as third parties that have authority to share the information. We may also collect information automatically such as through cookies as further described here.

Information Use and Disclosure

• Consent. We will use and disclose your personally identifiable information with your consent and at your direction.
• Provide Our Programs and Services. We use and disclose personally identifiable information to provide you or your educational institution with our programs and services, such as to administer tests, send scores, connect students with colleges and scholarships, and for educational efforts that help students and educators. When you agree to use a College Board program or service, you agree to the processing of your personally identifiable information as described in this Privacy Statement and the applicable agreement or terms of use presented to you, if any; see Program-Specific Privacy Policies and Supplemental Resources. All students have independent rights in their own test scores, including students’ rights to access, retain and use their test scores and direct College Board to share their test scores.
• Serve Educational Institutions. When College Board has an agreement with a school, district, state department of education, or higher education institution to provide assessments, financial aid services, and/or other educational services, it uses and discloses students’ and educators’ personally identifiable information as necessary to provide those services and for other limited purposes permitted by our agreements. College Board fully complies with the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, 20 U.S.C. s. 1232g, and its implementing regulations, 34 C.F.R. pt. 99 (“FERPA”), and state student data privacy laws, as applicable.
• Educational Reporting. We provide student information in accordance with our contracts and applicable international and domestic law to high schools, districts, colleges, and governmental agencies.  At the request of these organizations, we provide student information to third parties in support of the organization's educational, diagnostic, and/or reporting purposes.
• Operational Third Parties. We use and disclose personally identifiable information to third parties providing services to College Board as necessary for their performance of those services, such as:
  • administering testing services,
  • producing and generating student score reports,
  • processing CSS Profile applications and requests for financial information,
  • administering scholarship and recognition programs,
  • developing instructional materials and tools,
  • providing customer service,
  • sending email and SMS communications,
  • supporting the operation, hosting, and enhancing of our website(s),
  • event registration and administration,
  • payment processing,
  • fulfilling orders and shipping, and
  • maintaining, developing, supporting, improving, and diagnosing our products and services.

These vendors cannot relicense, sell, rent, or otherwise repurpose the information. These organizations have contractual requirements to protect personally identifiable information from unauthorized access, use, or disclosure.
 

• Customer Service. We use personally identifiable information to maintain your account and to verify user identity during customer service calls and respond to specific requests.
• Web Experience. We use personally identifiable information to customize and/or personalize your website experience, such as prefilling a test registration with stored personally identifiable information or fulfilling online purchase requests or other transactions performed on our website(s). See Cookies and Website Usage for more details.
• Research: We use personally identifiable information for research consistent with our mission, such as with respect to:
  • psychometric validity (e.g., does an assessment reliably and consistently measure what it’s supposed to measure, including across subgroups, and is that measurement predictive of performance in college?),
  • assessment and program design and improvement (e.g., is there a better way to measure this skill?),
  • safeguarding test security and fairness,
  • student engagement and program effectiveness (e.g., do students who do this activity learn or otherwise receive the intended benefits?),
  • identifying and producing public reports about trends in education, and
  • supporting educational research (with aggregated or de-identified data) by educational institutions and other reputable third party organizations.

For more information about our research, visit our Research page.

• Internal Analytics. We use personally identifiable information to maintain, develop, support, improve, and diagnose College Board products, services, and applications.
• Parents and Legal Guardians. If you are under the age of 18, we may disclose your information to your parent(s) and/or legal guardian(s).
• Other Instances. We may also disclose your personally identifiable information as required by law, for example, to comply with a subpoena or other legal process, when we believe in good faith that it’s necessary to protect our rights, protect your safety, or the safety of others, investigate and help prevent fraud, or respond to a government request.

College Board may use and disclose anonymized, aggregated, and de-identified data, except to the extent such disclosure may be limited by law or in an agreement it may have with an individual or institution.

Access to Your Information and Data Retention

College Board will give you information about whether we have, or process on behalf of a third party, any of your personally identifiable information, if reasonably available and subject to applicable laws.

We may keep your information as needed for legitimate educational purposes, to provide services to you or your educational institution, comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. Depending on where you live, you may have certain rights to request deletion of your personally identifiable information, subject to limitations and exceptions under applicable laws. College Board uses secure methods to delete or destroy personally identifiable information. 

If you have a College Board account, you may access and correct certain of your information by logging in to your account at my.collegeboard.org/profile. 

You can also ask us to close your College Board account. If College Board closes your account, you won’t be able to access your account. For students, this also means you will not be able to see or send any of your scores, or see information related to any other account activity. For educators, this also means you will lose your ability to access any of our programs or applications such as those used to administer College Board exams, AP teacher-related resources, and financial aid program tools. You’ll also be unsubscribed from optional communications and Student Search Service™, if applicable. Closing your account does not delete your information and you may request that College Board reactivate your account at a future date.

To make requests to access, correct, restrict, or delete your personally identifiable information or close your College Board account, please complete the Your Privacy Choices webform,  email us at [email protected], or contact Customer Service. We’ll respond to these requests within a reasonable timeframe and as required by applicable law.

Customer Service Contact Information:

College Board
250 Vesey Street
New York, NY 10281
Phone: (844) 849-3551

See our State Consumer Privacy Laws Supplemental Privacy Notice for additional information about your rights in certain states. EEA, UK and Brazil residents—see our EEA, UK and Brazil Privacy Notice for additional information about your rights.

Communications and Engagement

College Board uses your personally identifiable information to contact you about our programs and services, which are available to you as an individual and/or to institutions you may represent.

If you have a College Board account, you can manage your communication preferences. Based on your choices, we may send you two types of emails: transactional communications and optional communications about our programs and services. 

• Transactional emails relate directly to your participation in a College Board program or service or an action you took on our site.
• Optional emails inform individuals about College Board programs, services, newsletters, alerts, events, and surveys. When you create a College Board account, you’re given the option to receive these communications from us and can change your preferences at any time. To unsubscribe from optional emails:
  • Click the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of any College Board email
  • Manage your email subscriptions through your College Board account
  • Contact us at privacy.collegeboard.org/contact-us
  • Write to:
    College Board
    250 Vesey Street
    New York, NY 10281
    Attention: User Account Manager

See SMS (Texting) Program-Specific information for more details about our optional texting programs available for students and professionals. 

Cookies and Website Usage

Like most websites, our systems gather certain information automatically. This information may include internet protocol (IP) addresses, browser type, referring/exit pages, the files viewed on our site (e.g., webpages, graphics, etc.), operating system, date/time stamp, and/or clickstream data. This information is used to analyze usage trends in the aggregate and administer and improve the site.

We use cookies to remember your settings. This makes browsing more efficient on subsequent visits by using your preferences to customize the content and/or layout of our site(s). You can use your browser to control the use of cookies.

Cookies and other technologies such as beacons, pixels, tags, and scripts are used by College Board for analytics in analyzing trends, administering and improving the site, tracking users’ movements around the site, and to gather demographic information about our user base, but we do not disclose to third parties any of your personally identifiable information through these technologies.

This Privacy Statement covers the use of cookies by College Board only and does not cover the use of cookies by our business partners. We do not control or supervise how third-party sources process your personal information, and any request that you have about the disclosure of your personal information should be made directly to those third parties. Data that may be collected through these channels include, for example, IP address, access times, browser type and language, device type, and device identifiers.

Cookie Controls: Most web browsers provide controls that let you block or delete cookies. Generally, you can go to your browser’s Help section and see instructions for blocking or deleting cookies. However, certain features College Board uses on its site depend on cookies. If you turn off your cookie settings you can still use our site, but your ability to use some features or areas of our site may be limited.

Third Parties and Online Advertising: We do not display any advertising on our site. If you sign up to receive information about College Board programs, we may use third parties, such as Facebook, to provide information about our educational programs and services. Only hashed, non-identifiable information is provided to these third parties. We do not share personally identifiable information with any of these platforms, and they can only use what limited data we share to provide services to us. You can opt out of these communications in your account settings page at my.collegeboard.org/profile by clicking on Subscriptions.

When you visit certain pages on our website, such as BigFuture, we use pixels to record information about the user’s browsing session including the URL viewed, which is sent to third parties such as Facebook (or similar platform). No personal information is contained in or collected as a result of using these pixels. 

When we share usage data from our site with partners to improve the efficiency and quality of our engagement and outreach, the data that is shared is anonymous. College Board honors the Global Privacy Control (“GPC”) universal opt-out mechanism, where individuals use it to opt-out of targeted advertising, removing them from pixels that may lead to targeted advertising based on the user’s web behavior on our website.

For more information about interest-based advertising and how you can opt out from some of it, visit the NAI Consumer Opt Out page or the Digital Advertising Alliance Your Ad Choices site. You can also manage certain advertising cookies by visiting the EU-based Your Online Choices and the Digital Advertising Alliance of Canada site. You may also be able to limit interest-based advertising through the settings on your mobile device by selecting “limit ad tracking” (iOS) or “opt out of interest-based ads” (Android). You may also be able to opt out of some, but not all, interest-based ads served by mobile ad networks by visiting Your Ad App Choices. Please note that opting out of receiving interest-based advertising through NAI’s and DAA’s online resources will only opt out a user from receiving interest-based ads on that specific browser or device, but they may still receive interest-based ads on their other devices. You must opt out on each browser or device you use.

YouTube: We use the YouTube service to display videos related to our programs and services, such as college and career planning and opportunities and training for educators. YouTube uses tracking technologies, which may be present in the videos embedded on YouTube, which may collect information from your browser when you view the video, including device identifiers and/or cookie IDs. This information is collected directly and automatically by YouTube and its partners; College Board does not participate in these data transmissions. College Board does not provide any personally identifiable information, such as usernames, to YouTube. You can learn more about Google’s practices and control your settings on the service at YouTube policies.

See our State Consumer Privacy Laws Supplemental Privacy Notice for additional information.

Protection and Security of Information

College Board has a variety of reasonable administrative, technical, and physical safeguards in place to protect the security and confidentiality of personally identifiable information.We follow industry-recognized security practices and standards to protect the personally identifiable information given to us, both during transmission and once it’s received. College Board has ISO 27001 and SOC-2 certifications and is certified by third-party auditors annually to help us proactively manage risks and controls. However, because no data transmission over the internet nor any website, mobile application, database, or system can be guaranteed 100% secure, we can’t guarantee the security of information. If you have any questions about the security of your personally identifiable information, email us at [email protected].

Links: To give you more resources and information, we may include third-party links such as to colleges, universities, access organizations, scholarship organizations, career information, test preparation, and site administration on our site. These linked sites have separate and independent privacy policies that you should read. We have no responsibility or liability for the content and activities of these linked sites, but we want to protect the integrity of our site and welcome any feedback about these linked sites (including if a specific link doesn’t work).

Children Under 13

We do not knowingly collect personally identifiable information online from children under 13. If you know of a child giving us this type of information online, please send us a message or contact Customer Service to have the account deactivated.

International Users and Data Transfers

College Board, its website, and its website servers are located and operated in the United States, requiring your information to be transferred from your location to the United States, which may not provide the same level of protection for your personally identifiable information as your home country. The information may be available to the United States government or its agencies under a lawful order in the United States. When you give information to College Board through this website for any reason or otherwise send us your personally identifiable information, including for any of the services we offer, you acknowledge a cross-border transfer of that information to the United States. In addition, College Board works with a trusted third-party service provider, Alorica, to provide customer service with contact centers in the United States and the Philippines. If you do not agree to this international transfer of data, you shouldn’t use the website and the services it offers or otherwise send us your personally identifiable information. If you choose to revoke your consent to such transfer, and this is the lawful basis for the processing, we may cease processing your information. Depending on the service you’re using the website for, it may impact your ability to apply or be accepted to a U.S. college or university.

In certain countries, data protection and privacy laws provide individuals with certain rights, such as the right to access, correct, request deletion of, restrict or object to the processing of, or portability of your personally identifiable information. To exercise these rights, please complete the Your Privacy Choices webform or email us at [email protected]. If you exercise or seek to exercise any of those rights, our obligations to respond are limited by and subject to applicable law.

 EEA, UK and Brazil residents—please read the EEA, UK and Brazil Privacy Notice.

Changes to Our Privacy Statement

We sometimes update our Privacy Statement, so visit these pages periodically to review the latest changes. Policy changes will only apply to information collection after the date of change.

Contact Us

If you have any questions about this Privacy Statement or our privacy and data security practices, please contact us at [email protected]. You may also contact us at:

College Board
250 Vesey Street
New York, NY 10281
Phone: (844) 849-3551

Website Terms and Conditions

Please also visit our Legal Terms for Students and Legal Terms for Educators and Institutions, which establish the use, disclaimers, and limitations of liability governing the use of our website.

Jurisdiction-Specific Privacy Supplements

Notice of Your California Privacy Rights

California Residents—Your Privacy Rights: California law (California Civil Code Section 1798.83) permits residents of California to opt out of College Board disclosure of personally identifiable information to third parties for marketing purposes at any time. College Board will not disclose your personally identifiable information to third parties for marketing without giving you notice and getting your consent. Please note—this opt-out doesn’t prohibit disclosures for non-marketing purposes. You can opt out for free by contacting us or writing to:

College Board
11955 Democracy Drive
Reston, VA 20190
Attention: Student Search Service
Please note that College Board is not subject to the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) or the California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) as a nonprofit organization. 

California Do Not Track Disclosure
Some browsers may be able to send a do not track signal to websites. The College Board site does not respond to do not track signals or similar mechanisms and requests. 

State Consumer Privacy Laws Supplemental Privacy Notice

This supplemental privacy notice gives residents of certain states additional information required by their applicable consumer privacy laws, a current list of which is available on our Privacy Center. These provisions, together with the statements in the College Board privacy notices, explain our practices for processing  residents’ personal data to the extent their state’s consumer privacy law applies. If there are material changes to the Privacy Statement or its State Consumer Privacy Laws Supplemental Privacy Notice, we will contact those as required by their state laws using their College Board account email address.

Sensitive Data: College Board may collect and process certain information defined as sensitive under applicable states laws. This may include your race and ethnicity to provide and personalize our programs and services and conduct research consistent with our mission, mental or physical health condition or diagnosis to process your request for testing accommodations, citizenship to process your CSS Profile application, and data about individuals under age 13 to provide programs requested by them.  Further specificity on processing purposes for sensitive data will be provided to you through informed, express consent for any such processing as required by law.  You may have the right to opt-out of the processing of sensitive data as part of our consumer programs and services, which you may do through our Consent Management Preferences Center at my.collegeboard.org/profile/privacy.

Your Rights: College Board respects your right to access, correct, and request deletion of your personally identifiable information and to portability of it as required by law. Depending on where you live, this means:

• You have a right to know if College Board maintains your personally identifiable information. If we do, you have the right to access it and request that we provide you a copy of your information (subject to the rights of others) in a portable, and, to the extent technically feasible, readily usable format that allows you to transmit it to another entity.
• If your information is inaccurate, you have the right to ask us to update it.
• You may ask us to delete your personally identifiable information.
• You may ask us to identify third parties or categories of third parties to whom data may have been provided.
   

To exercise these rights, please complete the Your Privacy Choices webform, email us at [email protected], or write to us at the U.S. address provided in this Privacy Statement and our Customer Service team will assist you. You may also go to my.collegeboard.org/profile to access and correct certain personal data. Our ability to delete personal information will be limited when we’re required to retain records, as in connection with score reports and test security processes.

While not the “sale” of data as defined under otherwise applicable state consumer privacy laws, College Board also respects your right to opt out of Student Search Service (Search). You can opt out of Search at any time by submitting the Your Privacy Choices webform, going to my.collegeboard.org/profile/privacy, contacting us at 866-825-8051, or emailing us at [email protected].

You may authorize someone to act on your behalf to exercise these rights, using the same methods described above. We may need to verify your identity, and any authorized agent authorized by you to act on your behalf, before we can process your request. College Board’s process to authenticate identity includes name, date of birth, and security phrase or security questions, as well as further validation processes, if necessary, including use of the phone number associated with the account. 

If College Board does not take the action you requested when exercising these rights, you may appeal such inaction within a reasonable period after we have notified you of our denial of your request. To submit your appeal, please complete the Your Privacy Choices webform, email us at [email protected], or write to us at the U.S. address provided in this Privacy Statement.

Marketing Cookies: When you visit our website and with your consent, we place cookies on your computer. While College Board does not use data for targeted advertising as defined by state consumer privacy laws otherwise applicable to College Board, for convenience visitors to our site from certain states can opt out of cookies for nonessential website purposes when they first access our site, including marketing cookies. You may exercise your right to opt out of processing personal data for marketing cookies by clicking on the link “Cookie Settings and Your Opt-Out Rights” and then “Marketing Cookies,” presented as a banner when you visit our website. Please see the Cookies and Website Usage for more information about cookies and similar technologies.

EEA, UK and Brazil Supplemental Privacy Notice
 

This supplemental privacy notice gives those located in the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom (UK), and Brazilian residents additional information required by local law. These provisions, together with the statements in the College Board privacy notices, explain our practices for processing EEA, UK, and Brazilian residents’ personal data.

Cookies: Visitors to our site from the EEA, UK and Brazil can opt out of cookies for nonessential website purposes when they first access our site. When you visit our website and with your consent, we place cookies on your computer. Please see the Cookies and Website Usage for more information about cookies and similar technologies.

This EEA, UK and Brazil Privacy Notice explains why we collect your personally identifiable information and how we process it. When necessary, we collect and process your information per the lawful bases described below:

• To fulfill a contract with you, for instance to provide a College Board test or a test offered by another company on behalf of College Board.
• We may provide personally identifiable information to our operational third parties (processors) and other trusted businesses or persons to process it for us, based on our written instructions and in compliance with our Privacy Statement and any other appropriate confidentiality and security measures. For example, we use service providers to help process and score our tests.
• To process a payment, to create an account on our website, and for website management.

We may also process your personally identifiable information with your consent to send you optional email communications, enroll you in Student Search Service, or send your scores to your designated recipients.

We may also process your personally identifiable information for the purposes of our legitimate interests, if processing it doesn’t outweigh your rights and freedoms. We may process your personal information as needed to:

• Protect you, us, or others from threats (such as test security, security threats, or test fraud).
• Improve College Board tests and support College Board research initiatives.
• Enable or administer our business, such as for quality control, consolidated reporting, and customer service.
• Manage corporate transactions, such as mergers or acquisitions.
• Understand and improve our business, improve test integrity, and for research purposes.

We may also process your personally identifiable information to comply with applicable laws.

Automated Decision Making and Profiling: College Board may use automated processes in connection with scoring tests and for similar purposes, as needed to provide the test services you have requested, and for fraud prevention related to test security. All of these decisions are subject to human review. We will not make automated decisions about you that may significantly affect you, unless (a) the decision is necessary as part of a contract we have with you, (b) we have your explicit consent, or (c) we’re required by law to use the technology. You can learn more about test scoring by reading the information posted on our website about each of our tests. You can learn more about test security by reading the information posted on our website.

In some cases, we use certain elements of personal data for College Board research. For example, we may consider how certain types of test takers (such as non-native English speakers) respond to specific test questions. Our research initiatives reflect our commitment to fairness and equity in testing, helping to ensure that our tests are accessible and free from bias. They also aim to improve teaching, learning, and assessment. Our research results do not contain any identifiable data and aren’t used to target or profile individuals. Visit research.collegeboard.org to learn more.

Your Rights: As stated in this EEA, UK and Brazil Privacy Notice, you always have the right to object to our optional email communications. To opt out of these emails, click the Unsubscribe link at the bottom of any email we send you. And see the sections above related to communications and engagement for information about your choices and opting out.

College Board also respects your right to access, correct, and request erasure or restriction of your personally identifiable information as required by law. This means:

• You have a right to know if College Board maintains your personally identifiable information. If we do, we’ll give you a copy (subject to the rights of others). If your information is incorrect or incomplete, you have the right to ask us to update it.
• You have the right to object to our processing of your personally identifiable information.

You may also ask us to delete or restrict your personally identifiable information, including a copy of your information related to your right to data portability.

To exercise these rights, please complete the Your Privacy Choices webform, email us at [email protected], or write to us at the U.S. address provided in this Privacy Statement and our Customer Service team will assist you (we may need to verify your identity before we can process your request). Our ability to delete personal information will be limited when we’re required to retain records, as in connection with score reports and test security processes.

If you believe we have processed your personally identifiable information in violation of applicable law, you can file a complaint with the College Board Chief Privacy Officer by emailing [email protected] or with a supervisory authority.

Data Retention: We’ll retain your personally identifiable information for as long as the information is needed for the purposes detailed above and for any additional period that may be required or permitted by law. You may request that we delete your personally identifiable information by completing the Your Privacy Choices webform or emailing us at [email protected]. Unless we’re required by law to retain your information or have a legitimate interest in retaining it, we’ll delete it within 30 days of your request. If you ask us to delete your data you won’t be able to access any College Board account or test scores or send test scores to any colleges, universities, or any other third parties.