FairTest
National Center for Fair & Open Testing
for further information:
Bob Schaeffer (239) 395-6773
for immediate release Thursday, January 22, 2015
WIDESPREAD SAT CHEATING CONTINUES IN ASIA;
UPCOMING SAT. JANUARY 24 EXAM LIKELY COMPROMISED;
COLLEGE BOARD, ETS ENABLE CHEATING BY REUSING OLD TESTS
For the fourth SAT administration in a row, widespread cheating threatens the security of this Saturday’s college admissions exam in Asia. According to Robert Schaeffer, Public Education Director of the National Center for Fair & Open Testing (FairTest), “Recycling test forms that were previously administered in the U.S. is the root cause of this ongoing scandal.”
Schaeffer explained, “Last fall, widespread reports of SAT cheating forced the test-makers to delay reporting many scores. Some are still being withheld, including those from honest students who did not cheat. Earlier this week, a source sent FairTest a website link to what purports to be the test scheduled for use in Asia on Saturday, January 24. It appears to be an exam form administered in the U.S. in June 2014. Multiple other sources report that test coaching companies in China and South Korea are selling access to this document.”
“The test-makers now admit that scores from the October, November and December 2014 SATs were held back for ‘administrative review,’” Schaeffer continued. “Yet, the companies that own and manufacture the SAT – the College Board and Educational Testing Service (ETS) — have not addressed the underlying problem, their practice of recycling tests in Asia that have previously been seen by thousands of U.S. students”
A College Board web page states, “Over the past three months, organizations and individuals have illegally obtained and shared test materials for their own profit, to the ultimate detriment of students.” (http://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/sat/additional-information-about-score-reporting.pdf)
Schaeffer concluded, “In an age of instant global communication via secret websites, text messages, and cell phone videos, it is irresponsible for the College Board and ETS to act as if test contents can be kept ‘secret’ after their administration. Unless the test-makers stop recycling old exams in Asia, SAT ‘test security’ will continue to be an international joke.”
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And what will the “data” from these tests prove? About as much as any other mass-produced, canned assessments. The haves will have and the have nots won’t.
Enough.
Let’s bring back the joy of learning that humans are born with and stop boring and frustrating them to death.
Why is this so bad? Why are we so against Asian students cheating on the SAT so they can get into US universities? They pay top dollar to our private colleges and bring in much needed cash as out-of-state fees to our state colleges so that are not properly supported by their state’s legislatures. What else are our great institutions going to do? Increase tuition rates for their in-state students?
Oh, wait, they are already doing that.
Neeever mind! 😉
Seriously, folks, this is just a taste of what is to come when our K-12 schools start using tests to define the classroom mark. What will we do with the 50% of students who are below the average? Make them repeat the grade? Or will there be after-school cramming schools as in South Korea? What a brave new world, eh?
Ha Ha Ha! By definition 50% of the students will always be below average, just like the other 50% who will be above average.
You got the joke, Raj.
But this not going to be a laughing matter to those on the left side of the bell curve. There are people out there that want to actually make them flunk the course. That’s why there is so much talk about taking the tests on computers so they can return the results much faster and before the end of the year.
Say, isn’t that what New York is doing? I read somewhere that kids have to score above some level to go on to the next grade. How much is it going to cost to recycle these kids through the same grade again and again? Don’t laugh, there are subjects, excuse me, kids, that are just lousy test-takers.
“Reduce, Reu$e, Recycle”
The College Board is green
Recycling their te$t
As green a$ we have $een
They really are the be$t
I think the more competitive the environment, the higher the probability someone is going to cheat. Stuyvesant HS had a big cheating scandal a few years ago. I attended a somewhat competitive college and cheating was rather prevalent.
I think we need to take a step back and ask why we are expecting so much out of K-12 students. Why is it necessary to take all these AP classes, why are parents of 3rd graders announcing their child’s test scores, etc.? I think we are letting the “test scores” define us as human beings and I don’t understand why.
Call me a cynic, but to me it is competition, pure and simple.
Aren’t the prestige of the neighborhood’s schools very important when selling real estate?
Aren’t the bragging rights conferred by US News & World Report all important? (Never mind that they are highly subjective.)
Why do we “award” a bogus “excellence” label assigned on the basis of state scores to schools?
Why do politicians “celebrate” the “achievement” of such schools?
Why did someone recently commented that his/her SAT scores allowed him/her to compete with Ivy Leaguers and show them s/he was just as good?
It’s “mine is bigger than yours,” isn’t it?
I agree that more competition the greater the chance of cheating. I attended a selective public high school. I was the queen of Latin. Each morning I had a line of people waiting at my locker to check homework against mine. Much worse, when I was a junior, one of the freshman girls jumped off the roof and killed herself. Freshman year we lost about one third of the students that chose to return to neighborhood high schools. Too much competition can be deadly for fragile people!
Of course these inflated scores will be used to show just how inferior the US is for not cheating smartly.
“SAT”
The Shyster Aptitude Test
To measure cheating skill
Cuz college grades are best
For those who know the drill
When it’s about winning they cheat, when about learning, no need
TAGO!
And to think that llast year, the SAT test proctor at my local HS almost ripped me a new one when I accidently walked down the hallway where the tests was being given, and threatened that the test might be invalidated because of my innocent mistake.
I would have told the proctor to go f. . k him/herself or perhaps ES&D. But then again that’s just me!
I find this extremely disturbing, particularly in light of the bad-mouthing by (mostly conservative) ideologues of US education in general compared with Asian education.
The ETS/CEEB have long tried to merit a squeaky-clean reputation. This story severely tarnishes that and undermines confidence that all test-takers are playing on a level field in the context of exam administration.
I don’t mean to suggest that the playing field is level to begin with, given a host of social and economic issues, but at least the test-makers could claim to have done due diligence to avoid giving some test-takers the absurd advantage of taking a test they’ve seen and been directly coached for. This story tears that claim completely asunder.
If someone can hack the Defense Department, the CIA, the IRS and the NSA, there is no way SAT is going to avoid not being hacked.
And I just used three Google searched to verify that the Defense Department, the CIA, the IRS and NSA have all been hacked. I read about it in Forbes, The Washington Post, New York Times, etc.
A demonstration of how greed can undermine a business.
I’m appreciative that Diane posted this blurb on the SAT, and I’m intrigued by the comments. For example, concerned Mom, Former LA parent, and Michael Paul Goldenberg raise questions about competition, AP pressures, “prestige” and “bragging rights,” socioeconomic inequities, and test validity.
Here’s the thing: the SAT is a bad test that ranks test-takers – mostly – by family income.
Colleges know this, because they use SAT scores to leverage financial aid – mostly – to the students who need it least. They also tout the SAT scores of incoming freshmen classes, and their US News rankings (based in part on those same scores). Some colleges award generous bonuses for improvement in the rankings. And it’s all bogus.
The SAT doesn’t predict much. The founder of Princeton Review called it “a scam.” ‘The Big Test’ author Nicholas Lemann said there’s a “frenzy and mythology” that surrounds the test. College enrollment specialists – and all selective colleges have them – say their research finds the SAT predicts between 3 and 14 percent of freshman-year college grades, and after that nothing. One, who heads up am enrollment- management consulting company, commented, “I might as well measure their shoe size.”
The ACT – the other big college enrollment test, and which is built into some state testing – is only marginally “better.”
Here is what the authors of a study on the (lack of) predictive power of the ACT at colleges in Ohio said in their concluding remarks:
“…why, in the competitive college admissions market, admission officers have not already discovered the shortcomings of the ACT composite score and reduced the weight they put on the Reading and Science components. The answer is not clear. Personal conversations suggest that most admission officers are simply unaware of the difference in predictive validity across the tests. They have trusted ACT Inc. to design a valid exam and never took the time (or had the resources) to analyze the predictive power of its various components. An alternative explanation is that schools have a strong incentive – perhaps due to highly publicized external rankings such as those compiled by U.S. News & World Report, which incorporate students’ entrance exam scores – to admit students with a high ACT composite score, even if this score turns out to be unhelpful.”
Unhelpful indeed.
The issue of this blog for quite some times has been the Common Core. Diane seems to believe that it’s on the wane. I’m not so sure. SOME testing may get delayed for while. But everybody –– the NEA and AFT, the national PTA and elementary and secondary school principals, the national association of school superintendents –– has signed off on it.
More importantly, the Common Core is already embedded in other testing – the GED, the ACT, PSAT, SAT, and AP programs. Both ACT, Inc and the College Board tout the fact that they’ve “aligned” all their products with the Common Core. They also produce the “placement” tests commonly used at community colleges, ACT’s Compass and the College Boars’s Accuplacer. Accuplacer – a rather ironic name – is used in nearly 2/3 of community colleges to place students in “appropriate” courses. It’s an abysmal failure. The College Board lauds it, but independent research finds “only a weak relationship with educational performance.” You know like the ACT and SAT and AP.
There’s a shell game going on and everybody’s bought in. Critics cite the “remediation crisis” in colleges (see Accuplacer, above). Parents demand AP courses, and schools and boards of education push them. The College Board promotes grade weighting, and encourage it as early as sixth grade. More than 100,000 middle schoolers were taking the SAT) a decade ago. Prepping for the SAT has now become “normal” for “gifted” (deep sigh) programs and test prep centers.
And, to round it out, as Matthew Quirk reported in The Atlantic ten long years ago: “The ACT and the College Board don’t just sell hundreds of thousands of student profiles to schools; they also offer software and consulting services that can be used to set crude wealth and test-score cutoffs, to target or eliminate students before they apply…That students are rejected on the basis of income is one of the most closely held secrets in admissions; enrollment managers say the practice is far more prevalent than most schools let on.”
American education, especially higher education but increasingly pubic education too, is gamed. It’s not unlike what goes on at Wall Street: the system is rigged. It’s manipulated.
There’s a reason that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Business Roundtable are avid supporters of the Common Core. But improving public education is not it.
The real question -– and concern, and surprise –– is why public school educators and “leaders” – and parents – are playing along.
Well said democracy!!
To add to your final thought: “The real question -– and concern, and surprise –– is why public school educators and “leaders” – and parents – are playing along with epistemologically and ontologically invalid concepts that are the educational malpractices of educational standards and standardized testing.
Of course I would be remiss if I did not reference Wilson’s proof of the invalidities involved with those educational malpractices:
“Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” found at: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/577/700
Brief outline of Wilson’s “Educational Standards and the Problem of Error” and some comments of mine. (updated 6/24/13 per Wilson email)
1. A description of a quality can only be partially quantified. Quantity is almost always a very small aspect of quality. It is illogical to judge/assess a whole category only by a part of the whole. The assessment is, by definition, lacking in the sense that “assessments are always of multidimensional qualities. To quantify them as unidimensional quantities (numbers or grades) is to perpetuate a fundamental logical error” (per Wilson). The teaching and learning process falls in the logical realm of aesthetics/qualities of human interactions. In attempting to quantify educational standards and standardized testing the descriptive information about said interactions is inadequate, insufficient and inferior to the point of invalidity and unacceptability.
2. A major epistemological mistake is that we attach, with great importance, the “score” of the student, not only onto the student but also, by extension, the teacher, school and district. Any description of a testing event is only a description of an interaction, that of the student and the testing device at a given time and place. The only correct logical thing that we can attempt to do is to describe that interaction (how accurately or not is a whole other story). That description cannot, by logical thought, be “assigned/attached” to the student as it cannot be a description of the student but the interaction. And this error is probably one of the most egregious “errors” that occur with standardized testing (and even the “grading” of students by a teacher).
3. Wilson identifies four “frames of reference” each with distinct assumptions (epistemological basis) about the assessment process from which the “assessor” views the interactions of the teaching and learning process: the Judge (think college professor who “knows” the students capabilities and grades them accordingly), the General Frame-think standardized testing that claims to have a “scientific” basis, the Specific Frame-think of learning by objective like computer based learning, getting a correct answer before moving on to the next screen, and the Responsive Frame-think of an apprenticeship in a trade or a medical residency program where the learner interacts with the “teacher” with constant feedback. Each category has its own sources of error and more error in the process is caused when the assessor confuses and conflates the categories.
4. Wilson elucidates the notion of “error”: “Error is predicated on a notion of perfection; to allocate error is to imply what is without error; to know error it is necessary to determine what is true. And what is true is determined by what we define as true, theoretically by the assumptions of our epistemology, practically by the events and non-events, the discourses and silences, the world of surfaces and their interactions and interpretations; in short, the practices that permeate the field. . . Error is the uncertainty dimension of the statement; error is the band within which chaos reigns, in which anything can happen. Error comprises all of those eventful circumstances which make the assessment statement less than perfectly precise, the measure less than perfectly accurate, the rank order less than perfectly stable, the standard and its measurement less than absolute, and the communication of its truth less than impeccable.”
In other word all the logical errors involved in the process render any conclusions invalid.
5. The test makers/psychometricians, through all sorts of mathematical machinations attempt to “prove” that these tests (based on standards) are valid-errorless or supposedly at least with minimal error [they aren’t]. Wilson turns the concept of validity on its head and focuses on just how invalid the machinations and the test and results are. He is an advocate for the test taker not the test maker. In doing so he identifies thirteen sources of “error”, any one of which renders the test making/giving/disseminating of results invalid. And a basic logical premise is that once something is shown to be invalid it is just that, invalid, and no amount of “fudging” by the psychometricians/test makers can alleviate that invalidity.
6. Having shown the invalidity, and therefore the unreliability, of the whole process Wilson concludes, rightly so, that any result/information gleaned from the process is “vain and illusory”. In other words start with an invalidity, end with an invalidity (except by sheer chance every once in a while, like a blind and anosmic squirrel who finds the occasional acorn, a result may be “true”) or to put in more mundane terms crap in-crap out.
7. And so what does this all mean? I’ll let Wilson have the second to last word: “So what does a test measure in our world? It measures what the person with the power to pay for the test says it measures. And the person who sets the test will name the test what the person who pays for the test wants the test to be named.”
In other words it attempts to measure “’something’ and we can specify some of the ‘errors’ in that ‘something’ but still don’t know [precisely] what the ‘something’ is.” The whole process harms many students as the social rewards for some are not available to others who “don’t make the grade (sic)” Should American public education have the function of sorting and separating students so that some may receive greater benefits than others, especially considering that the sorting and separating devices, educational standards and standardized testing, are so flawed not only in concept but in execution?
My answer is NO!!!!!
One final note with Wilson channeling Foucault and his concept of subjectivization:
“So the mark [grade/test score] becomes part of the story about yourself and with sufficient repetitions becomes true: true because those who know, those in authority, say it is true; true because the society in which you live legitimates this authority; true because your cultural habitus makes it difficult for you to perceive, conceive and integrate those aspects of your experience that contradict the story; true because in acting out your story, which now includes the mark and its meaning, the social truth that created it is confirmed; true because if your mark is high you are consistently rewarded, so that your voice becomes a voice of authority in the power-knowledge discourses that reproduce the structure that helped to produce you; true because if your mark is low your voice becomes muted and confirms your lower position in the social hierarchy; true finally because that success or failure confirms that mark that implicitly predicted the now self evident consequences. And so the circle is complete.”
In other words students “internalize” what those “marks” (grades/test scores) mean, and since the vast majority of the students have not developed the mental skills to counteract what the “authorities” say, they accept as “natural and normal” that “story/description” of them. Although paradoxical in a sense, the “I’m an “A” student” is almost as harmful as “I’m an ‘F’ student” in hindering students becoming independent, critical and free thinkers. And having independent, critical and free thinkers is a threat to the current socio-economic structure of society.
By Duane E. Swacker
“A man on a mission”
There’s one thing sure:
You’re not remiss
On Wilson’s tour
Of mal-practest