The College Board blew it again. After the fiasco of the June 2018 SAT, industry experts expected the test maker to deliver an impeccable exam experience for the August SAT. Instead, College Board ran a familiar play from its bonehead playbook by administering an SAT that was either partially or entirely leaked in Asia less than a year ago.
WHY???
The College Board approaches security at testing sites with all the warmth and compassion of a cranky TSA agent. Yet, internal security measures to safeguard test integrity from hackers and leakers can only be described as sloppy. Reusing test questions known to have been released into the wild undercuts any pretense of a commitment to fair and valid testing.
Could it be that creating new test material costs too much for the College Board? Neil Chyten of NC Global Education, Inc. pegs the cost of just one SAT test question at $1000, which equates to nearly $200,000 to create a single SAT test. That estimate may be low, as a 2016 Reuters feature on this exact security failure reported that developing a single version of the SAT can take up to 30 months and cost about $1 million, according to people familiar with the process.
While I cannot vouch for the dollar amounts attached to the test development process, I can attest to the extraordinary levels of attention devoted to the creation of each and every question on these tests. Many years ago, one of the heads of the SAT math team explained the 20-50 steps in crafting exam questions that tested–without bias–what they were supposed to test and didn’t test what they weren’t supposed to test. No other exam in the United States has ever, to my knowledge, risen to the meticulous standard of standardization established by the SAT and ACT at their best.
Unfortunately, today’s aspirants to American colleges and universities aren’t seeing these tests at their best. Neither test maker pretests questions and norms exams the way they once did, which leads to uneven exams with unpredictable score scales. Even worse, both testing organizations seem more focused on new, shiny expansions rather than their core products. Shipping last year’s model with an updated label, which essentially describes College Board’s August offense, often signals the decline of even mighty companies.
A million dollars a test shouldn’t be a hardship for a non-profit organization that charges upwards of $50 per test for millions of test administrations a year along with plentiful fees for additional exams and services. In fact, College Board–and ACT too–should invest even more than that per exam to ensure the highest quality testing experience for students and score data for colleges and other educational bodies. These two mission-driven organizations make significant contributions to college success and opportunity for millions of students a year. But none of their peripheral projects focusing on state testing, college planning, subject tests, or workplace readiness matter a bit if their core tests fail.
College Board just bungled two tests in a row. How many more strikes with colleges and college applicants give them before the SAT is called out? If you ran a testing organization and wanted to prevent a future where your test was no longer relevant, you might consider investing a million dollars a test to be a bargain.
Thank you, Mike, for your recap of this sobering news. Why the College Board recycles questions when everyone knows tests question photos are leaked online and spread internationally is beyond the comprehension of this writer! My sympathies to all the hard working students and coaches who prepped in good faith for the August 2018 test and have to deal with this mess. It seems unlikely that the College Board will cancel, wholesale, the results of this test, but I wonder if they will investigate any spikes in scores from particular applicants who had lower scores in the past. How will cheaters be differentiated from students who worked their tails off to up their scores from one season to the next??
Perhaps it will become even more important to post a high score on the PSAT to avoid later suspicion when there is the (seemingly inevitable) next SAT question security fiasco.
An entire class of kids at a local school decided to play during the PSAT instead of taking their exam. This came back to bite them in the butt when their first SAT scores were cancelled due to suspicious increases. While I have stopped short of advising students to prep for the PSAT (unless, of course, they could be candidates for National Merit recognition), I have passed this on as a cautionary tale.