Information Use and Disclosure

College Board uses and discloses your personally identifiable information to carry out our organization’s mission for the following purposes.

  • 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 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.
  • Consent. We will use and disclose your personally identifiable information with your consent and at your direction.
  • 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, and
    • fulfilling orders and shipping.

    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 and 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.

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