Theories Abound to Explain College Board’s Abrupt Ban on Certain SAT Takers

Courtesy Robert Schaeffer

The College Board announced on Monday that it would bar all nonstudents from taking the new SAT this Saturday. That irked test-prep tutors, hundreds if not thousands of whom had registered for the examination, eager to see how it had or had not changed. In their field, firsthand experience with standardized tests is gold.

The College Board has long allowed people who aren’t high-school students to take the SAT. So many registrants were surprised to learn that they couldn’t do so until the next administration of the exam, in May. “Letting people who are in a position to advise students actually take the test and see what’s going on, that’s valuable,” said Sheila Akbar, director of education at Signet Education (formerly Veritas Tutors), in New York. “The College Board has made it clear that they don’t want test-prep people taking this test.”

But the College Board cited a different concern for the policy change — cheating. Katherine Levin, a spokeswoman for the organization, told The Chronicle on Monday that an internal analysis of registrants revealed “an unusually high number of people associated with a security risk,” based in part on when — and how many times — they had taken the test. Did that mean that the College Board has come to consider test-prep tutors who’ve taken the SAT repeatedly a “security risk”? If so, why? And what sort of cheating does the organization hope to curb?

The College Board hasn’t quite answered those questions specifically. “We want to prevent individuals and organizations from attempting to illegally obtain and share test materials,” Ms. Levin wrote in an email on Monday. Students who take the March SAT won’t be able to get a copy of the test via the College Board’s Question-and-Answer service, but those who take it in May will. For that reason, Ms. Levin wrote, in reference to the latter exam, “there is a reduced security risk that test content will be stolen.”

That explanation didn’t convince some testing experts, including Robert A. Schaeffer, public-education director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a watchdog group known as FairTest that’s long criticized the College Board. Although the answer “kind of made sense,” he said, it didn’t explain “the unique security risk” associated with the March exam: “The only way it could be about cheating is if they planned to recycle the March 5 SAT elsewhere.”

In an interview on Tuesday, Mr. Schaeffer shared his thoughts on the latest testing flap. The following is an edited version of that conversation.

Q. What do you think is going on here?

A. I’m not certain what’s going on. I just think they don’t want professional eyes looking closely at the first version of the new test that’s already been controversial.

Q. The College Board has said it wants to ensure that the March SAT is taken only by those who are doing so for the “intended purpose” of the test, which is to say, those who are applying to college. Does that strike you as important or meaningful?

A. This is certainly what the historic role of the SAT has been. However, the College Board is currently marketing the SAT very heavily as a high-school test for all students to comply with the federal requirement to test every student in high school on state college- and career-readiness standards. So they are, in fact, marketing the test for purposes other than that. So I would say that it’s a statement of convenience.

Q. Have we seen other instances where nonstudents weren’t permitted to sit for a specific administration of a test? Either because they had taken the same test many times before, or aced it twice, or for some other reason?

A. To the best of my knowledge, it has never happened before. I can’t prove it, but we’ve heard from a half-dozen test-prep people who have never heard of it happening.

Q. One test-prep expert suggested that the College Board might be concerned about “establishing an accurate curve” on the new test during an administration in which hordes of test-prep folks had reportedly registered for the new SAT.

A. It’s a possibility, but even if they were concerned that older test takers were going to contaminate the norming pool, they obviously knew who those test takers are. They could’ve let them take the test, held back their scores, and not distorted the norming pool. Something else is going on.

Q. People who don’t like test prep aren’t going to shed a tear because test-prep companies now won’t be able to get an early look at the new SAT. But is there a broader issue here, something deeper than the test-prep vs. College Board narrative that’s developed over the last two days?

A. The official FairTest response is: “A plague on both their houses.” We recognize that the high-end test-prep business is a natural free-market response to the way the SAT and ACT are used in our society. We do not blame them for what they do, but we do stress that they tilt an already-unlevel playing field more in favor of the kids who already have the most going for them.

Q. The College Board has said it’s concerned about “test security”? What does that term mean?

A. The SAT is a standardized test. That means students take the same or similar questions, under standardized conditions. If some test takers have an advantage on a particular test, because of prior knowledge, or because somebody’s whispering in their ear through a mini-microphone stem in their eyeglasses, it undermines the basic assumption of standardized conditions.

Q. OK, but what about savvy, well-trained test-prep experts who regularly take exams, absorbing insights and information, to better serve their paying clients. They’re arguably undermining the basic assumption of standardized conditions. Are they engaged in a form of cheating?

A. That’s a philosophical question. Cheating isn’t black and white — it’s more a spectrum. But to my mind, no. What a legitimate test-prep firm does is not cheating. It’s short of where I would draw the line. But a company that obtained a copy of the exam before it was administered? That would be different.

Q. In an age of high-tech gadgetry and instant communication, it’s hard to keep information about tests from flying all over the world. What’s it mean when students can go right home and describe the test they just took on College Confidential, as many students do?

A. They’re not even waiting until they get home. They go on a bathroom break, they post on Facebook and Twitter, describing the items that are on a test. People will often put up links to a Google Doc where kids compile entire tests right after they’ve been administered. “Oh, I remember Question 3, it was this,” and then someone will say, “No, it was more like this.” They’ll rebuild an entire test, or nearly an entire test, with individual contributions. The notion of secrecy in the 21st century, where you can communicate an image or words around the globe in a blink of the eye, it just doesn’t exist.

Q. The word “open” is part of your organization’s name. Why is openness an important idea when it comes to standardized testing?

A. With the SAT, “truth in testing” legislation requires that the College Board periodically disclose an entire copy of the SAT, which a test taker can get, and then give — to a reporter, a test-prep professional, or to me — a copy of the exam they took and the correct answers. We believe that public oversight of high-stakes tests helps promote better policy because the public gets to see, academic scholars get to see, students parents get to see, and the media gets to see, what are otherwise secret products that are used as gatekeeper exams.

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.