Last week the College Board held its annual National Forum, and like most other conferences and meetings during the pandemic it was held virtually. I don’t always attend the Forum, but have gone the past two years, even presenting last fall in D.C.
I didn’t sign up for the virtual Forum largely because of my experience with the virtual NACAC Conference, where I registered then didn’t have the time to attend the sessions or watch the recordings. Even though I wasn’t “present virtually” (that sounds like the premise for a sci-fi movie), I glanced through the program for the Forum to see what was being discussed.
College Board meetings often feel like pep rallies or infomercials for College Board products, and I certainly noticed some of that. What I noticed even more was what was missing from the program. There are two issues I would have like to seen discussed.
The more consequential of the two is the elephant in the Zoom room, the very future of admission testing itself. If there was any discussion, or even acknowledgement, of the existential threats to the testing industry as we know it, I missed it.
This has been a hard year for the College Board. The pandemic shut down almost all spring testing, and this fall hasn’t been dramatically better. Nearly half of the students nationally who registered for the SAT administrations in August, September, and October weren’t able to take the test because of school closures or diminished seating capacity. (The ACT has had the same issues.)
That has led to a string of significant consequences. When students weren’t able to take admission tests due to supply chain issues, the College Board lost revenue from fewer students taking the tests and from less student data to sell through the Student Search program. The transition last spring to Advanced Placement exams taken online at home received mixed reviews, and may have cemented the suspicion that online admission testing is an idea whose time has not come.
The loss of testing opportunities for students meant that colleges moved en masse to test-optional policies for at least the coming year. But is testing in college admission on a sabbatical, or is it being furloughed with no guarantee of reinstatement?
And is the test-optional movement a revolution, or merely a provisional government on the way to a future that is test-blind? Admission testing may turn out to be collateral damage in a movement that has arisen from the confluence of the pandemic and the social unrest related to the Black Lives Matter movement. There are voices asserting that the SAT and ACT are tools of systemic racism, and last week a California Appeals court upheld an earlier court decision prohibiting the University of California system from using test scores. The plaintiffs in that case had argued both that tests are racially discriminatory and classist, and also claimed that applicants with disabilities are denied access and opportunities even by test-optional policies.
The second issue is more mundane, an example of “Think globally, act locally.” I acknowledge that it will irritate those who want to “end, not mend” admission testing. For those of you who wonder just how many clichés I can cram into a single paragraph, I recognize that many readers may ask “Where’s the beef?” I raise the issue because I want to advocate for my students’ interests and because I know how much the College Board values input from its members.
A crisis like we’ve gone through this spring should lead all of us, including the College Board, to recalibrate what we’re doing. I hope that includes rethinking the SAT calendar.
That’s already happening to some extent. After the pandemic hit and removed opportunities for members of the Class of 2021 to take admission tests last spring, the College Board added a September test administration, whereas ACT added multiple dates in September and October. But is it time to go a step further?
I swear that I remember an announcement back in the spring that the College Board would also add a January testing date for the coming year. There was a January administration until maybe five years ago that was removed when the CB decided to add an August test date for seniors. I told juniors and parents about the added January date, expressing my belief that it’s the ideal time for my juniors to take the SAT for the first time.
Imagine my surprise, then, a month or so ago when I was looking at the calendar of SAT dates and noticed nothing about a January date. Had I made that up? I reached out to Adam Ingersoll from Compass Prep, who keeps his ear to the ground regarding testing. He reassured me that I wasn’t crazy, at least on this particular issue, and that there had been some chatter about adding a January date.
It turns out that a January testing date has been added, but it’s a PSAT date, not an SAT date. And so I want to ask two questions. Do we need a January PSAT date? And if testing doesn’t disappear altogether, is the current calendar the right calendar for students to take the SAT?
With regard to the first question, the answer depends on what you think the justification for the PSAT is. The obvious answer is that the PSAT is a practice test for the SAT, and that the January date is a makeup taking into consideration the fact that many students weren’t able to take the PSAT in its normal October window.
But is practice for the SAT the sole purpose for offering the PSAT? The official name of the test is PSAT/NMSQT (a tongue twister that makes me want to take a breath or buy a vowel). That reflects the fact that the PSAT/NMSQT (a registered trademark of the College Board and the National Merit Scholarship Competition) also serves as the qualifying test for the National Merit program. I assume that partnership is lucrative for the College Board, so a reason to add a January PSAT. It is also the case that the PSAT is a prime source of names for Student Search, an even more lucrative initiative.
Returning to the “practice for the SAT,” by January shouldn’t juniors be focusing on taking the SAT rather than a practice test for the SAT? That leads into my second question, whether the SAT calendar should be re-envisioned.
Currently the College Board offers test dates in March, May, and June in the spring and August, October, November, and December in the fall. Does that testing calendar reflect or respond to the acceleration of the college application process?
For the most part the fall dates for seniors work, with one exception. The addition of an August test date was a great addition given the earlier application deadlines. But if there needed to be one less date, should it have been December rather than January? Almost none of my seniors take the December test.
Right now there is a three-month gap between the December test and the March test. Throughout my career I have advised my juniors to take the PSAT in the fall and the SAT in the spring. That increasingly seems like a losing battle as an increasing number of students and parents feel the need to take the SAT in the fall of the junior year, and that number is far greater at other schools I’m aware of, some of which no longer give the PSAT to juniors because they have all taken the SAT by October of the junior year. I’ve tried to resist that because I don’t see those scores being anywhere close to what students earn later in the year.
The question is whether that is an independent school phenomenon and whether we are out of touch with the testing schedule of other students. I tried to obtain data on the percentage of seniors vs. juniors taking the SAT in December vs. October and November, hoping to find out if a lot of seniors are still taking the test as late as December.
In response to an inquiry, a College Board spokesman told me he didn’t know the junior/senior breakdown. When I asked whether he didn’t know or whether no one at the College Board knew that information and shared with him my reason for asking, he told me he would check. I never received any hard data in response, just a comment that January was the least popular administration and that the College Board’s experience is that most students don’t take the SAT until spring of the junior year. So is it possible that the College Board does not know how many juniors as opposed to seniors take the test in any given month, is that information proprietary, or did they just not want to share the info with me? And do most students wait until spring because there are no opportunities from early December until early March?
I’d like to see the College Board drop the December test date and replace it with a January test date, but I’m willing to be convinced that I’m misguided. It wouldn’t be the first time.