College Board Makes An Announcement that Impresses No One
Summer has a strange effect on the folks over at the College Board. Although they spend most of the year administering one of the most hated tests of all time, they literally have nothing to do between the June SAT and the October SAT. So they make announcements about policy changes, statistical research, and other things that kids don't care about at all. It helps them stay in the news so that everyone remembers how awesome and important the SAT is supposed to be when the fall rolls around.
This week College Board announced that they are going to let students pick which scores they send to colleges instead of forcing students to send a record of all their scores. The program won't go into effect until the Class of 2010 begins taking the SAT next year, but it will allow students from that point forward to reveal the scores they like and hide the scores they don't like.
This isn't a radical idea.
The ACT has been doing it for years and up until 2002, College Board allowed students to use "Score Choice" in order to review their scores before they were sent to colleges. Even though Score Choice is dead and gone, Todd Johnson points out on his blog that most schools only consider the highest scores students send to them, making this change not only a direct retreat from a previous stance for College Board, but also sort of a pointless endeavor anyway.
In fact, the whole point of this change is to compete with the ever more popular ACT, not to make test taking easier on kids. In 2007, 1.3 millon test takers took the ACT, rivaling the 1.5 million SAT test takers and making College Board sweat the fact that more and more teachers, admins, and independent college consultants are strongly recommending the ACT. This change, like most changes on the SAT, is about marketing, market share, and the ever growing fear at College Board that someone will figure out how bad their test really is.
Yet, in typical College Board fashion, the interview they gave to the LA times noted how much they were helping students with their latest change and acted as if the previous program had never been axed by them back in 2002:
"Students were telling us the ability to have more control over their scores would make the test experience more comfortable and less stressful," said Laurence Bunin, senior vice president of the SAT. ". . . We can do that without in any way diminishing the value and integrity of the SAT."
Seriously, Laurence? Did you talk to a lot of kids who said that more control over their scores would be helpful? Did you talk to any kids at all? Or did you simply decide that the ACT had some good marketing buzz that College Board wants in on?
Sometimes I wonder if working for College Board makes your brain hurt. It must be frustrating to work for a company who feels a compulsive need to spin everything they do, all the time. And it's certainly obnoxious to have to blather on about an announcement that everyone agrees will have no effect on the tests or admissions.