FICO Scores

FICO Scores were developed by Fair Isaac Corporation in the late 1980s and are used today to evaluate provider risk and consumer creditworthiness for everything from borrowing money to buy a house to obtaining automobile insurance.
You can obtain your FICO score for a small fee, but it is not free. The company will send you a credit report and scores from three credit reporting agencies. Typically lenders will throw out the top and bottom score and keep the middle score. Make sure you are receiving a genuine FICO score or NewGen score. Each credit bureau has a different name for its FICO score. Equifax is Beacon. Experian is Experian / Fair Isaac Risk Model and TransUnion is Empirica. Everything else is an imposter.
The FICO score your lender gets and the FICO score you can order yourself will most likely be two different scores, do don't expect the score you receive to match. FICO scores range from 300, which is very bad, to 850, which is the very best.