The College Board sent a surprising email on Monday. “Due to a new test security measure,” the message said, recipients couldn’t take the SAT this Saturday even though they had registered for it. Instead, they would have to wait until May.
Many of those who received the email have two things in common: They aren’t teenagers — and they work for test-preparation companies.
High-school students aren’t the only ones who take standardized tests on Saturday mornings. Professional tutors have long done so to glean insights into the examinations. Although testing agencies have more or less tolerated the practice for years, that could soon change.
The move could signal that testing agencies are no longer going to tolerate test-prep tutors’ taking the exams in order to share insight with their clients.
The College Board said its main concern was preventing fraud. Some testing experts said the organization wanted to limit scrutiny of much-anticipated changes in the SAT — or foil the test-prep field at a time when the SAT provider is offering test “practice” through a partnership with Khan Academy. Whatever the case, no one can dispute this: On a test-obsessed planet awaiting the debut of the revamped exam, plenty of people with varying motivations can’t wait to get a look at it.
Concerns about cheating prompted Monday’s email, according to the College Board, which owns the SAT. In an interview with The Chronicle, Katherine Levin, the College Board’s director of assessment communications, said an internal analysis of registrants had revealed an “unusually high number of people associated with a security risk,” though she declined to specify how many.
The College Board looked at several factors, including the number of times a registrant had taken the SAT and the dates of those exams. (The registration form asks test takers to provide their date of birth and Social Security number.)
The College Board assigned new testing dates to registrants who most likely were not students, Ms. Levin said in a written statement, “to ensure that anyone taking the test is doing so for its intended purpose: to apply to and attend a college or university undergraduate program, or to apply for scholarship, financial-aid, or other programs that require a college-admissions test.”
In a follow-up email, Ms. Levin said the College Board’s concern was preventing “individuals and organizations from attempting to illegally obtain and share test materials.”
Keeping a test under wraps is a big deal in an era when test fraud has become a global problem. Cheating scandals have plagued overseas administrations of the SAT for years.
The College Board makes some but not all SAT exams (with questions and correct answers) available to test takers after the administration date. The May version of the exam will be released, but the March version will not.
Any test-prep operation worth its salt, insiders say, gets hold of those materials.
“That’s why all the test-prep folks want to get all the insight they can in March,” said Akil Bello, director of strategic initiatives for the Princeton Review, a test-prep company. “In theory, the College Board could do things they didn’t tell us they were going to do on the test.”
Mr. Bello figures he has taken the SAT about 10 times since becoming a tutor. Usually he and his colleagues discuss what they saw on a particular test to understand how it might be changing. “There are subtle shifts in the tests that happen over years,” he said. “It might be how they’re testing vocab or a type of question that hasn’t been asked before. We want to keep up.”
Ned Johnson, who had planned to take the SAT this weekend before receiving the email from the College Board, described a similar goal. “We want to be able to advise kids about the nature of the test,” said Mr. Johnson, founder and president of PrepMatters, a test-prep company with offices in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington. “I understand the College Board’s need to respect the integrity of the questions. I’m not interested in a specific question, but the concept being tested, the degree of difficulty.”
At least one testing company refers to test prep in its registration materials. The ACT Inc. says it may prohibit a registrant from taking the ACT exam if it believes her or she “may be working for test-preparation providers.”
The College Board’s policy tells test takers that “there is never any point in time at which you are allowed to discuss exam content unless it is released as part of a College Board service.”
Mr. Johnson said he had never been barred from taking a standardized test he sought to take. He suspected that the College Board’s move was about more than test security. “They don’t want the scrutiny,” he said. “They don’t want anybody like me to dissect the new SAT. We want to see if this test is going to be a kind of head fake, promising one thing and delivering something else.”
On Monday some test-prep officials said they had heard from frustrated college counselors and members of community-based organizations who had registered for this weekend’s SAT, hoping to help their students prepare for it. Others were baffled that the announcement arrived mere days before the exam. A few wondered about students who might have received the message in error.
Ms. Levin, at the College Board, said in an email that anyone who met the stated conditions for taking the SAT — and who had a deadline requiring them to take the March exam — had been encouraged to “call customer service so we can review their request.”
Eric Hoover writes about admissions trends, enrollment-management challenges, and the meaning of Animal House, among other issues. He’s on Twitter @erichoov, and his email address is eric.hoover@chronicle.com.
