SAT Snafu
Tomorrow morning hundreds of thousands of students will sit for the April 1st SAT.
These students will put their faith in a test and a testing process that have come under intense scrutiny in the last few weeks.
By now many of you know the specific details of the College Board’s scoring snafu on the October 8th SAT. According to Pearson Educational Measurement, the company responsible for processing the tests, excessive moisture content compromised the scoring process. Intensive rain increased the moisture content and thickness of the answer sheets, causing the tests to improperly align, and resulting in erroneously low SAT scores for 4,600 high school students, roughly 1% of the 495,000 students who sat for the October test. Not only did this tarnish the reputation of the College Board and damage its credibility, but it also brought into question the very integrity and fairness of the SAT test.
This isn’t the first time the College Board, ETS or Pearson Educational Measurement have been implicated in scoring errors. In 2003-2004, ETS batched the Praxis standardized test for assessing the qualifications of educators. 27,000 teachers received erroneous scores and 4,100 were incorrectly told that they failed the test, when this was not the case. A federal judge awarded $11.1 million in damages to settle the lawsuits. Pearson Educational Measurement is also no stranger to improperly graded standardized tests. In 2005 it incorrectly scored a Virginia high school exit exam, failing 60 students who deserved to pass. In 2000 Pearson botched a Minnesota high school exit exam, causing 8,000 Minnesota students to flunk and keeping 50 seniors from graduating. Pearson settled the resulting claims for $7 million.
This recent high-profile error on the SAT has everyone upset - administrators, parents, students- and who can blame them? Parents are scrambling to see if they can reverse admissions decisions, admissions departments are scrambling to accommodate the students who were unfairly evaluated, and an army of attorneys waits to dive in to the fray. Calls have arisen to finally put an end to the collegiate standardized testing process. Are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the SAT test? Is it time to burn the endless stacks of vocabulary note-cards, chuck the Blue Books, and free up all those long SAT Saturdays? Every high school student would dance in the streets if this were the case, but there are many reasons why the SAT is going to survive this current debacle.
First off, attacks on the College Board and standardized testing are far from a novel occurrence. Since the 1930’s the SAT has drawn continual criticism from a variety of sources. It is a ready target. By its very design, this test draws distinctions and creates divisions. Though these distinctions may not be entirely fair, they are profoundly useful to college admissions departments looking to quickly and cost-effectively evaluate thousands of applicants.
Colleges are bombarded with tens of thousands of applications each year, and admissions departments need some objective methods of comparison. GPA is moderately useful, but is far from standardized. A 3.4 at one school means something totally different from a 3.4 at another. Evaluating essays and recommendations is a highly subjective process. Admissions departments have historically used class rank as a method of standardization, but more and more high schools are choosing to withhold class rank to protect their students not in the top tier. This pushes admissions officers to put more emphasis on the SAT and other metrics which allow them to easily rank students and filter them into their admissions algorithms.
While working at Emory this year, I was able to speak to an admissions rep who told me that AP and IB classes are becoming more and more important in Emory’s decision making process. Like the SAT, these tests yield standardized results that can be easily compared across any segment of the population. A student who receives 4s and 5s on AP tests or 6s and 7s on IB classes will really stand out. The Emory rep told me that the “Big 3″ for Emory admissions were the APs and IBs, GPA and SAT.
So for admissions officers, a standardized test such as the SAT makes their lives much easier and their processes much more efficient.
Beyond admissions, the SAT has become important in our perceptions and assessment of the relative performance of a college or university. School ranking has become a big deal for students and for universities alike. Each year, universities eagerly anticipate the results from the US News & World Report college survey. At Emory this year, when the report was released, word quickly spread that Emory was ranked #19 in the country. And that meant something to the staff. As a high school junior, I clearly remember reading through that list and making my first pass at schools I wanted to see. There are many factors at play in determining the final ranking, but the average SAT score is one of the most easily quantifiable metrics, and also one of the most important in determining this final ranking.
So the SAT still serves a useful purpose. If the SAT goes away, it will most likely be promptly replaced by a new standardized test, which will have the same limitations and benefits as the current SAT.
To right itself after this “disaster”, the College Board has some work to do. It needs to invest in overhauling its scoring process to solve for the ignominious “technical processing error.” It will inevitably pay out a significant amount of money in damages to settle the inevitable lawsuits it will face as a result of botched admissions decisions and undue stress. And finally the College Board must conduct a significant PR campaign to redeem its image and regain the trust and confidence of the public and the university system.
But the College Board will survive the current barrage of criticism directed its way. And the SAT, 80 years old and going strong, will continue to be relevant for the foreseeable future. Its form will certainly continue to change. The SAT may lose its essay in a few years and hopefully will see its duration reduced to a more reasonable level for a high school student. But unless we see a revolution in American education, standardized tests such as the SAT will continue to play a very significant role for decades to come.