Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed reports that the SAT is facing more trouble than usual due to its practice of recycling questions.
His story begins:
The SAT periodically faces controversies, such as when the mathematics test given in June was widely seen as easier than normal and — courtesy of the curve — resulted in many students being shocked by low scores. Outrage spread on social media, but after a week or so, many move on. But this year, another controversy has emerged before people have stopped complaining about the last one.
There are signs that the latest SAT controversy may not pass easily. The August SAT was based on an SAT given in Asia in October. The use of “recycled questions” became known to the public almost as soon as the administration of the August SAT was over — as reports spread that some students from Asia had taken the test in the United States and may well have had an advantage. The College Board responded, as it usually does to such reports, by saying that it had good security measures in place and would block scores of any who had access to the questions in advance.
The controversy is not quieting.
On Thursday in Florida, a class action lawsuit was filed against the College Board on behalf of the father of young woman who took the August SAT. The father and the daughter are not named, and the suit seeks damages on behalf of all who took the SAT in August.
The suit charges that the College Board knowingly went ahead with the use of recycled questions, despite knowing of the security risk the use of such questions creates. The suit notes that Reuters in 2016 published an in-depth report on SAT security problems, with a focus on the way versions of the test leak in Asia, and that these versions contain questions that are later recycled on other tests.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Same as it ever was.
Reuse of test questions and I so e cases entire tests has been the policy of the College Board for a long time.
There is no way of knowing how many and which particular students have benefitted from this policy.
The SAT has been a cruel joke forever, little more than a money making scam for a bunch of white guys in suits who can’t make money honestly like most people so have to resort to crooked ways of ripping off American families.
Good that someone is finally calling these crooks on their scam.
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And not just American families, but families!is around the world.
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“Good that someone is finally calling these crooks on their scam.”
Oh, many people have “called those crooks on their scam” many times since their inception. But, as with all things that are fraudulent money makers, until those who make the money are actually prevented from selling their snake oil, whether that snake oil be standardized tests, canned curriculum, charter school miracles, fraudulent bankster or insurance ‘products’, cancer-causing agents, unhealthy ‘foods’ etc. . . those avaricious bastards continue to bank their ill-gotten profits.
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But, hey, we must allow the ‘free market’ to discipline those fraudulent profit takers say the neo-con (double entendre intended) libertarians.
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It’s actually very ironic that the College Board does not get sued for their fradulent tests but instead for reusing tests.
It’s as if it doesn’t matter that the test was fraudulent to begin with as long as you give a new fraudulent test each time.
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SDP…I fully expect Duane to chime in with his wronger/righter quotes. Please Duane, amuse me today!
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Ask and you shall receive LisaM (thanks for the reminder, eh):
Doing the Wrong Thing Righter
The proliferation of standardized assessments, rubric based evaluations and canned computer based programs belongs in the category of what systems theorist Russ Ackoff describes as “doing the wrong thing righter. The righter we do the wrong thing,” he explains, “the wronger we become. When we make a mistake doing the wrong thing and correct it, we become wronger. When we make a mistake doing the right thing and correct it, we become righter. Therefore, it is better to do the right thing wrong than the wrong thing right.”
There is no doubt whatsoever that the standards and testing malpractice regime is doing the WRONG and UNETHICAL THING. Why the hell anyone (Fairtest?) would attempt to “do it righter” only to “become wronger” is beyond my comprehension. But then again Bob Schaeffer has pooh-poohed my concerns from the first time I brought them up with him at one of the first NPE conferences and has continued to ignore my concerns since. If I didn’t know any better I’d say he’s a DFER at heart.
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Thank you DES….that quote sounds so Seussical and it gives me a chuckle every time you use it.
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De nada.
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My pleasure.
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and long years of snake-oil test selling has illustrated that one thing to count upon is that the salesmen will simply rename their product and continue pushing
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Doing the wrong thing righter reminds me of what happened to the incorruptible Maximillian Robespierre when he was forced to lead the French attempt at extreme revolution. When he was not in power, he was all about idealism, suggesting the freeing of the slaves in Santo Domingo and prohibiting capital punishment. When he became the defacto dictator of France as leader of the Committee of Public Safety, he instituted the Terror, putting some 40,000 people to he guilotine mostly on hearsay rumor mongering. That number paled by comparison to the thousands of people that were butchered in the civil war that was going on at the same time. As hostilities subsided, those who suggested pulling back were put to death as he moved to create good citizens with the threat of the guilotine.
In a more bureaucratic way, this is what happens when a bad idea is taken and reformatted bureaucratically to seem like it works. The Reign of Error (man that would make a good title for a book) would spread like it did in the French Revolution, resulting in widespread malpractice.
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FairTest is working with the attorneys who brought the class action lawsuit against the College Board and ETS. Students, parents, or counselors who believe they were negatively impacted by the recycled SAT administered on August 25 should contact us at fairtest@fairtest.org to share their stories and get connected to legal assistance.
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I’d have to say that EVERY student who did not see the questions ahead of time was negatively impacted by those who did because the scores figure into college acceptance decision s which are ery competitive.
If you are competing for acceptance at a college gainst someone who saw all the questions (and possibly answers), you are at a distinct unfair disadvantage.
And because it is impossible to know just which students saw the questions ahead of the US administration of the test, it is impossible to remedy the situation.
They really have no choice but to cancel all scores but that is certainly not going to be a popular action.
College Board is in very deep doo-doo on this.
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When will Fairtest do the right thing and finally come out against using completely invalid standardized tests (other than SpEd diagnostic type test for individuals) for anything? You can go a long way, Bob, in helping us rid this country of the scourge of the standards and testing malpractice regime by having Fairtest coming out completely against said monstrosities. When????
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Duane,
This is one of those cases where if one accepts the foundational premise as valid (that standardized tests can be fair), one ends up arguing about all sorts of essentially meaningless absurdities: this test was unfair because some students saw the questions ahead of time but that test was “fair” because no one did (even though the latter test was biased toward a particular socio-economic class)
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Incidentally, one could make a pretty good case that bias toward a particular socio-economic class is actually equivalent to seeing the test questions ahead of time.
So this “unfairness” argument applies across the board.
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Amen, Duane, & just NO to administering those tests, nationwide.
What if every principal, teacher & other administrators NATIONALLY walked out & refused to give tests, & parents took ALL of the younger children out of school in support of those refusing to give the tests, their kids refusing to take them (led by their parents), &… what if ALL high school students ALL across the country just WALKED OUT & REFUSED (instead of going through all the opt out hoops) to take the tests?
This has been discussed to death. It’s been nearly TEN years since Todd Farley wrote his expose, “Making the Grades: My Misadventures in the Standardized Testing Industry.” & this absolute
abomination–forcing kids to sit for hours of test prepping (not just taking tests) rather than get a REAL education has been in the works
for “other people’s children” since at least 1971 (birth of A.L.E.C.)–oh, actually before (read Nancy MacLean’s book “Democracy in Chains).
Take money meant for education–billions of dollars–& just give it to Pear$on for test prep materials & tests (& talk about recycled tests!!).
No recess, arts or library time (the last–if the schools even have libraries: so many in Chicago do not–being the amount of time the libraries–or “media centers” as they’re now known, cannot be used during testing periods, because their computers are being used for…testing). Therefore, no real education, socialization, physical education (first thing to go these days, even as we have a “childhood obesity problem”) or ANY education. Children being primed to become minimum-wage Walmart “Associates”…or Amazon Fulfillment Center worker bees.
Oh, & your amusing “Doing the Wrong Thing Righter” could actually be used as a real Pear$on CCRAP question…for 3rd graders!*
& there would be NO right answer, so EVERYONE would get it wrong…er.
*(LisaM’s comment about this piece being “Seussical” made me think of this idea.) Never forget “The Pineapple Question!!”
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“Butt, butt, butt, it costs too much to make all new tests.” David Coleman
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Thank heavens for these kinds of problems. Without them, people would go right on thinking that the tests are a valid “measure” [sic] of something worth measuring. If recycled questions is what it takes to convince people that these tests are a bunch of crap, well, then, recycle away!
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Unfortunately, this reuse “problem” will be short lived.
Computer tests that give different students different questions will render it moot.
It’s only the fact that College Board is run by idiots that has prevented them from recognizing this.
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I love the idiots that run the College Board. May they never wise up.
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The new Semistandard Aptitude Test, same great questions, less filling.
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Hooray for STEM, the integrity of numerical methods, building the foundation to get to Mars
Reusing questions?
Mars give or take a million miles. Close counts? Partial credit?
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Recycled questions is an example of cost cutting to boost profits but the College Board is supposed to be a non-profit.
Does the College Board pay David Coleman a bonus for increasing revenue aka profits?
“The SAT May Have Been Changed To Help The College Board Maximize Revenue”
https://www.businessinsider.com/the-sat-may-have-been-changed-to-help-college-board-maximize-revenue-2014-3
“How much do big education nonprofits pay their bosses? Quite a bit, it turns out.”
“David Coleman, the president and chief executive officer of the College Board, as well as a trustee, earned for the 2013 fiscal year ending June 30, 2014: $690,854 in reportable compensation plus $43,338 in other compensation from the organization and related organizations. Total: $734,192. (Coleman, a co-author of the Common Core State Standards in English Language Arts, joined the College Board in 2012, and was new in his job). [See the College Board 990 here.]”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/09/30/how-much-do-big-education-nonprofits-pay-their-bosses-quite-a-bit-it-turns-out/?utm_term=.10c9498c7cc1
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Am I correct in recalling that SAT and other entrance tests were an attempt to democratize the way colleges accepted students in the 1920s? If that is true, it is ironic that these bad ideas would be in trouble for the tipping of the playing field.
Of course, we all know that the presence of prep classes for college entrance exams, indeed for the Bar exams, CPA tests, or any other test designed to assure standards makes the scores even worse predictors of success than they already are. Rule one of any experiment: the observer affects what it observes.
Some years ago, there was a Calvinist in town that loved to posit a question to support his idea of determinism. If a rock became conscious after you threw it into the air, would it perceive itself as the thing that had been responsible for its own Path? This is where we are with testing. It is making its own case that it is the guide for all of education. Do you have a mehod that you think is a good one? You need “data” to show it. Want to suggest class size affect learning? Again the requirement of data. All this means is that testing is the self-absorbed medium of evaluation. If testing is invalid, then all our educational research is meaningless.
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“If testing is invalid, then all ‘our’ educational research is meaningless.”
The tests are not ‘ours’. The tests belong to the self-appointed ruling class, the 0.1 percent, and the few (from what I’ve read, about 2,000 mostly old, wealthy white men) are using those results as a weapon to dismantle and destroy the public schools.
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“If testing is invalid, then all our educational research is meaningless.”
Too simple. My tests were an attempt to find out what my students understood and what I needed to reteach. As a class I could see patterns. For an individual student, one test usually told me very little. So many factors played into an accurate assessment. I used to spend hours jiggering grades because I knew more about a student’s abilities than my grade book scores might indicate. I hated it when they made us put grades online. It got so much more difficult to at least try to give a fair overall grade, especially when they didn’t want us giving credit for “soft” factors like effort. Then I spent hours figuring out how to weight different types of assignments.
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I believe Roy is referring to standardized tests in his statement and not teacher-made tests. I believe he meant:
“If standardized testing is invalid, then all educational research based on the results of the tests is meaningless.”
Please correct me if I am wrong, Roy.
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I think you are probably right, Duane, although the preceding sentences were problematic for me. I am not a fan of testing as a way to make high stakes decisions about policy that go far beyond what any test can claim to support. In the current climate, data is invested with a totally unjustifiable, magical power in support of simplistic analysis. Roy has always been a voice of reason as far as I am concerned.
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Read my book “Left Back” for the history of the SAT.
The original “College Boards” were essay exams where students explained their answers in every subject.
The questions were written by professors and high school teachers, then graded by professors and high school teachers.
In 1926, the College Board hired CC Brigham of Princeton to try to turn an IQ test into an easily graded machine-scored test.
On Dec 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, there happened to be a meeting of college presidents at the HQ of the College Board, and on that day they decided to drop the traditional essay exams and begin using the new Scholastic Aptitude Test. It was lauded as a time saver and a money saver. They knew that with the declaration of war, no one had time to sit around and write questions and grade written answers.
And that is how the SAT was born!
One other notable fact: C.C. Brigham wrote a racist book in 1925 about the IQ differences between races and European ethnic groups. Like most psychologists of his day, he believed that IQ was innate, inherited, and immutable.
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A high IQ number means nothing without motivation, goals, discipline and determination to never to give up. When you fail, you learn from your failure and keep on working to achieve your goals.
Again, a high IQ numbers means nothing.
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Lloyd,
A high IQ number is meaningless to begin with. IQ is a false concept.
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Yes, I think the IQ theory was created by a racist as a false justification for a false white racial superiority.
Using an IQ number to claim superiority over others is no different than using the results of student scores on high stakes tests to label public schools failures, closing those schools, and also firing teachers based on student scores, in some cases teachers have been fired for the scores of students they never taught.
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