Fact: Your SAT may be recycled.

31 Jul

Posted by Sam Jackson as Admissions, College Board, odd & fun

Just a quick mention to get out this scary / funny word out: Our friends at ePrep wrote way back in February that SAT tests were being recycled, and no, I don’t mean the paper. FairTest Examiner wrote in April about the same issue:

The College Board cancelled the January 28, 2007 SAT scores of 900 Koreans because some students previously had access to the questions. The reason test items circulated in advance is that the exam was identical to the SAT administered in December 2005.

Though the December 2005 SAT was not made public under “Truth in Testing” provisions, which apply to questions and answers from only four of the seven SAT administrations each year, students post items from every exam on the Internet. In addition, some coaching schools have run sophisticated operations to collect entire exams, either by sending in teams of test-takers to memorize the exam or by obtaining entire forms.

The College Board offered no reason to believe that the prior-exposure problem was confined to one Asian nation.

Other thoughts: it must suck to be one of those test-question memorizers. I tend to remember the ones I think I missed, which haunt me until I get my scores… at which point they continue to haunt me.

Wait, it gets better. The College Board explanation for the repeated test?

The College Board, which owns the SAT, and its contractor, the Educational Testing Service, justified the test recycling practice by claiming that it costs “probably $350,000″ to create each new exam. But 326,000 students took the January SAT, paying a base registration fee of $41.50. That means test-makers took in more than $13 million at this administration. Given that huge revenue stream and the fat surpluses historically enjoyed by the College Board and ETS), the companies had no credible financial excuse for cutting corners.

The lesson from all this? Taking those practice tests could be even better than you first expected!

Oh, by the way, that official online College Board SAT prep course is still 100% free, check out my post on it from last year.

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Who is Sam Jackson?

I'm currently a sophomore at Yale University and I've been blogging about college admissions and higher education marketing trends since I began my college application process in 2005. I now also write about my experience here at Yale, and am an official Yale blogger. Click here to read my 'about' page.

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