Do we have to post our official final transcripts to the universities that we applied for or are our counselors able to just email copies of them over? Which schools require actual transcripts? How important are they in the admissions process e.g. if final score was higher or lower from school midterms? I also understand that we can give them two ‘updates’ or like send them more information about NZQA Scholarships, extra SAT scores, other important things we’ve been doing with our life etc… is the transcript included with those ‘update package’ thingies?
Your counselor can send in the final transcript via final report on the common application. Many Universities have update forms, for example MIT has their FUN (February Update&Notes) form. The universities do not require final scores, and if they need them they will email your counselor. However, if you would like to send in your scores or updates, if they don’t have a form, you can do so via email, fax, mail or optional reports on common app. Also, to answer your question on importance: like every part of your application, it will matter and colleges always take a holistic judgement of you. Saying that, it’s about as important, if not more, than your predicted if you took IB in nov, for example, for RD schools but doesn’t matter as much as your GPA over time.
So would it be a good idea to send in my remarked final IB score if it’s higher than my predicted? And would I have to courier the copies to the schools or are most of them electronic? Is that what Louisa was talking about with the “final transcript”?
Yes, you should definitely send your final score if it is higher than your predicted. There are many options you can take to send your scores such as emailing the school, through a phone call, asking IB to send the scores, however the most convincing method would be to ask your counsellor to send the scores over using the “optional report” option on the counsellor common app. Transcript is just a list of grades, so yes.
Also if you look at common app, there is a requirement for a “final report”. This is your end of year grades which will be sent by your counselor to the school you decide to enrol in after decision come out in March/April.