by Erica L. Meltzer | Aug 6, 2016 | Blog, The New SAT
Thanks to a blog reader for submitting this comment.
How many abysmal fails has College Board committed/experienced in the past 18 months?
The test (June 2015) with a misprint on the last sections about how much time students had that led to uneven test administrations across the country.
Disruptions in sending October (or was it November) scores to colleges because they started using their new system for score distribution – for the old test scores – before most admissions office had shifted over to that system (because this was still the old test format). (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 24, 2016 | Blog, The New SAT
In my last post, I took the College Board to task for its boast that its partnership with Khan Academy has led to a 19% decrease in the use of paid prep, presumably defined as classes or tutoring, although the College Board fails to specify. Aside from the questionable basis for that statistic (exactly how was it obtained? what were the characteristics of the groups surveyed? how were the demographic changes incurred by the adoption of the SAT as a state test taken into account?), I do think it’s worth exploring the question of just how the new SAT might affect the tutoring industry.
For what it’s worth, I’ve heard from a number of tutors that their business is actually up this year, although those tutors tend to work with students for whom free, online prep is borderline irrelevant anyway.
I’m also aware that most experienced tutors are pushing their students toward the ACT for the foreseeable future. If there was indeed a drop in paid SAT preparation, it was almost certainly in some part due to students paying for ACT preparation instead.
What interests me here, however, is the assumption that students will be the ones driving the changes.
But what if it goes the other way as well? What if it turns out that tutors don’t want to prepare students for the new SAT? (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 20, 2016 | Blog, The New SAT
The following passage is excerpted from a recent College Board press release: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/one-year-since-launch-official-sat-practice-on-khan-academy-is-leveling-the-playing-field-for-students-300278934.html.
A year ago today, Official SAT® Practice for the new SAT went live on KhanAcademy.org, making free, world-class, personalized online practice available for all students. There are now more than 1.4 million unique users on Official SAT Practice on Khan Academy — this represents four times the total population of students who use all commercial test prep classes in a year combined. Data show that the practice platform is reaching students across race, ethnicities, and income levels — mirroring the percentage of SAT takers. Almost half of all SAT takers on March 5 used Official SAT Practice to prepare, causing a 19 percent drop in the number of students who paid for SAT prep resources.
Which of the following would most directly undermine the College Board’s assertion that the number of students using Official SAT Practice was responsible for the 19 percent decline in the number of students paying for SAT prep resources? (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 7, 2016 | Blog, Issues in Education, The New SAT
Manuel Alfaro, a former executive director at the College Board, has written a series of posts on LinkedIn detailing the myriad problems plaguing the development of the new exam.
According to Alfaro, not only were many of the items developed for the first administration of the test extraordinarily problematic (see below), but many of the items that appeared on the test were not actually reviewed by the Content Advisory Committee until after the test forms had been constructed.
Committee members repeatedly attempted to call David Coleman’s attention to the problem, but were ignored. (more…)
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 5, 2016 | Blog, The New SAT
According to the chatter on College Confidential, some students are reporting that they received June SATs identical to their March tests.
At this point, it’s also common knowledge that Asian test-prep companies have been distributing the March test. Inevitably, then, some lucky students will have prepped for the June exam using…the June exam. (As if barring adults from non-released exams was ever going to prevent this sort of occurrence.)
This comes just as the College Board and Khan Academy announce that they have successfully leveled the playing field among test-takers.
The College Board has been in the habit of recycling tests for quite a while, but it would stand to reason that three months isn’t quite long enough to wait.
Somehow I don’t think this is what the College Board meant by “transparency.”
by Erica L. Meltzer | Jun 1, 2016 | Blog, Issues in Education, The New SAT
In the spring of 2015, when the College Board was field testing questions for rSAT, a student made an offhand remark to me that didn’t seem like much at the time but that stuck in my mind. She was a new student who had already taken the SAT twice, and somehow the topic of the Experimental section came up. She’d gotten a Reading section, rSAT-style.
“Omigod,” she said. “It was, like, the hardest thing ever. They had all these questions that asked you for evidence. It was just like the state test. It was horrible.”
My student lived in New Jersey, so the state test she was referring to was the PARCC.
Even then, I had a pretty good inkling of where the College Board was going with the new test, but the significance of her comment didn’t really hit me until a couple of months ago, when states suddenly starting switching from ACT to the SAT. I was poking around the internet, trying to find out more about Colorado’s abrupt and surprising decision to drop the ACT after 15 years, and I came across a couple of sources reporting that not only would rSAT replace the ACT, but it would replace PARCC as well. (more…)
