How was your week last week? Chances are it was better than the week the College Board experienced. Last week the College Board found itself attacked, and perhaps existentially endangered, on two different fronts.
The more significant of the two is the unanimous vote by the Board of Regents of the University of California in support of President Janet Napolitano’s plan to suspend the system’s use of the SAT and ACT as a requirement for admission until 2024. Under Napolitano’s proposal, released just two weeks ago, the UC system will extend for two years the test-optional policy it adopted in March in response to the disruption in testing for high school students graduating in 2021. Beginning in 2023, all University of California campuses will be “test-blind,” meaning that students can submit SAT or ACT scores but they won’t factor into admission decisions. By the fifth year the University of California will develop its own admission test or abolish the use of testing in admission altogether.
The California decision is a blow to the testing industry at a time when it is already reeling from lost test dates and revenue in the wake of COVID-19. It is a particularly bitter blow for the College Board, as the University of California system is its biggest “customer.” According to the Los Angeles Times, 80% of the UC system’s 172,000 applicants last year submitted SAT scores.
The impact is even bigger than that, though. The College Board has always treated the University of California with “most favored nation” status. It was the UC system’s adoption of standardized testing for admission as part of Clark Kerr’s Master Plan in the early 1960s that made the SAT a national test. That wasn’t an accident.
According to Nicholas Lemann’s book, The Big Test, the UC decision to adopt the SAT was the product of a long marketing campaign on the part of the College Board. The CB’s first branch office was opened in Berkeley, home of the University of California’s flagship campus, in 1947. The University of California was the first public university to become a College Board member, with the CB making an exception to its requirement that member institutions have the SAT as an admissions requirement. At one point in the 1950s the College Board went so far as to offer the SAT at no cost to University of California applicants. Can we imagine such a thing today?
More recently, the new version of the SAT introduced in 2006 was in response by a threat by then UC-President Richard Atkinson to eliminate the SAT as a requirement for admission to the system. Atkinson argued for a test rooted in achievement rather than aptitude, and the SAT was changed to incorporate higher-level mathematics, a writing section with an essay, and scores on a scale of 2400 rather than 1600. The writing section with essay has since been removed from the newest iteration of the SAT, but Napolitano’s proposal for a new test captures Atkinson’s desire for a more achievement-based test.
An article by Eric Hoover in the Chronicle of Higher Education reported that the California Board of Regents vote came after six hours of intense debate by videoconference over the pros and cons of standardized testing in admission. Defenders of testing cited a report issued back in February by a panel appointed by the university’s Academic Senate. That report recommended that the university continue requiring the SAT or ACT for the near future. Those wanting to end testing argued that the testing requirement disadvantages applicants from underrepresented populations, with one UCLA student calling the SAT a “racist” exam.
There is one irony, perhaps even an oddity, in the plan put forth by President Napolitano. During the two-year period when the University of California is “test blind,” it will not consider test scores for admission but will for scholarship evaluation. That means that the UC system will choose not to use the SAT or ACT for the purposes for which they are intended, but will use them for purposes for which the tests are not intended. Regardless of how you feel about the tests, that seems misguided.
The second threat to the College Board comes in the form of a class action lawsuit filed last week in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles asking for $500 million in damages as a result of the Board’s failure to provide adequate access and oversight of its Advanced Placement exams the past couple of weeks. Among the plaintiffs is the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, better known as FairTest.
Once the pandemic shut down schools nationwide in March, the College Board announced plans to offer AP exams to be taken by students online at their homes. The exams were shortened from three hours to 45 minutes, with students all over the world taking the same exam at the same time. The syllabus of topics to be covered was shortened, and the exams were open-book, open-note assessments.
The pivot to the new format raised more questions than it answered. The College Board’s expressed justification for the change was concern for students hoping to earn college credit for their AP work, but the cynics among us will be forgiven for jumping to the conclusion that the real concern was the loss of revenue that would have resulted from cancelling the exams altogether. But does the new online exam resemble the traditional Advanced Placement exams, and will colleges evaluate scores and award credit for these exams as they have in the past?
As soon as the AP exams commenced on May 11, there were reports of students getting error messages or timing out when they attempted to submit their completed answers. Those unable to complete the submission process were told their only option was to retake the exam during the makeup period. For the second week of the exam schedule, the College Board allowed students experiencing submission difficulties to take a photo of their answer and submit by e-mail. That didn’t satisfy critics, including those filing the lawsuit.
I have read both the complaint in the lawsuit and the College Board’s press release announcing the success of the online exams, and I am not convinced by either of them.
The lawsuit alleges that the College Board was negligent, “knowingly discriminated,” and “failed to honor its commitments to students.” It argues that the AP Program was aware in advance that there were concerns about access to connectivity, test security, score comparability, and accommodations for students with disabilities, but “did not change its policies to address them.”
I’m not a lawyer, nor did I sleep in a Holiday Inn Express last night, and while it is hard to know in our litigious society what conclusions a judge or jury might draw, I’m not sure what the College Board was supposed to do. We are in the midst of a pandemic the likes of which hasn’t been seen for 100 years, and with schools nationwide closed the College Board’s options were limited to either rushing into circulation the online, at-home tests or cancelling the AP exams altogether. Cancelling would have led some other group to argue that the CB “failed to honor its commitments to students.” Clearly the test format disadvantaged students with poor connectivity or needing accommodations, and the College Board makes an appealing villain, but I’m not sure what alternatives there were.
At the same time, the College Board’s response to students frustrated by their inability to submit answers once they finished the test was tone-deaf, right out of the public relations playbook used by the Trump administration to deny responsibility for the failed national response to the coronavirus. The College Board had to have anticipated that there would be technology problems, and responding with “it must be your browser” and “just retake the exam” doesn’t cut it.
The correct customer service response for a faulty product is to have a back-up system in place from the start, or else just apologize and refund the customer’s money.
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