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According to Reuters:
Just months after the College Board unveiled the new SAT* this March, a person with access to material for upcoming versions of the redesigned exam provided Reuters with hundreds of confidential test items. The questions and answers include 21 reading passages -- each with about a dozen questions -- and about 160 math problems.
Reuters doesn't know how widely the items have circulated. The news agency has no evidence that the material has fallen into the hands of what the College Board calls "bad actors" -- groups that the organization says "will lie, cheat and steal for personal gain." But independent testing specialists briefed on the matter said the breach represents one of the most serious security lapses that's come to light in the history of college-admissions testing.
To ensure the materials were authentic, Reuters provided copies to the College Board. In a subsequent letter to the news agency, an attorney for the College Board said publishing any of the items would have a dire impact, "destroying their value, rendering them unusable, and inflicting other injuries on the College Board and test takers."
College Board spokeswoman Sandra Riley said in a statement that the organization was moving to contain any damage from the leak. The College Board is "taking the test forms with stolen content off of the SAT administration schedule while we continue to monitor and analyze the situation," she said.
Then, of course, there's the problem of unprepared "students" clogging up the already sluggish educational system...
* [Editor's Note] The SAT is a standardized test widely used for college admissions in the United States. It was first introduced in 1926, and its name and scoring have changed several times, being originally called the Scholastic Aptitude Test, then the Scholastic Assessment Test, then the SAT I: Reasoning Test, then the SAT Reasoning Test, and now simply the SAT.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @10:52AM
OP is saying that because this approach is possible - having someone write the answer for you and then memorizing - the test type used for literature is bad. I agree with him about literature testing in my country (idk how SAT is).
Even when you don't have the questions, rote memorization is the best way to study for literature. You read acclaimed analyses of the relevant works in advance (reading the actual works is optional), memorize the key points in advance, and when you get the essay topic you just regurgitate the key points you memorized with some other bullshitting for the relevant works. If SAT intentionally picks super obscure works that aren't in the curriculum to make it impossible for a student to have read a relevant analysis beforehand then the test would be about understanding and thought; if it works on a predictable set of titles then it's about rote memorization.
Contrast maths. Even for an exam with 20 questions and 8 variants that were leaked beforehand, from scratch you can only memorize 2-3 questions with intermediate steps. Anything more would require a herculean effort and you'd find it much easier to just learn how to solve the stuff. Having the key helps, no doubt, but you'll use it to memorize the one question you always struggle with, not to bypass the entire math section.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @10:59PM
People mindlessly memorize how to solve math equations all the time. Knowing "how to" solve the problem isn't the same as understanding why it works; the latter is far more important. Most of the people who pass the math sections of these standardized tests don't even truly understand the math.