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posted by martyb on Thursday August 04 2016, @08:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the leak:plumber-::-SAT:??? dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by quintessence on Thursday August 04 2016, @02:52PM

    by quintessence (6227) on Thursday August 04 2016, @02:52PM (#384073)

    Yes, they do this for several licensing test where there is a pool of questions to draw from. But that means you can't compare candidates since they aren't taking the same test.

    So then they decided to "weight" the questions based upon some official sounding criteria (computer adaptive), so even though no one was getting the same test, they all had the same "difficulty" as judged by whatever.

    Small problem- you can't reproduce the results. You'd expect the same person to have some mild variability in multiple takes of the test. Instead the range was all over the place, with some who previously passed, failing and vice versa. Ooops.

    They quit testing that aspect. I have no idea what they do now, but last I paid attention they were moving towards "specific knowledge" questions, and you are right back where you started with everyone getting the exact same test with a few variable questions thrown in to justify increasing the fees.

    It seems to me that maybe we are asking too much from tests, that maybe the SAT is better designed to answer "are you reasonable competent enough to probably graduate from college without getting drool all over yourself" instead of "are you worthy of the Ivy League".

    Except even in that role, the SAT has proven to be meaningless.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2014/02/21/a-telling-study-about-act-sat-scores/ [washingtonpost.com]

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