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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: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @08:56AM
If people are able to cheat the test merely by having the questions, then chances are the test is terrible and relies on rote memorization. This is not appropriate for subjects like mathematics.
Standardized tests as they are now are designed to make it easier and cheaper for the test takers to grade, not to test a someone's actual understanding of the subject. I guess they eliminate people who didn't even bother to memorize the material, but Jeopardy! geniuses--of which there are many--will still slip through.
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Thursday August 04 2016, @09:06AM
That doesn't follow. For example, let's assume there's a test that requires you to write an essay about a certain subject told to you at the beginning of the test. Clearly that is something you cannot do with rote memorization. But if someone leaks the subject to you before the test, you can ask someone to write the essay for you, memorize that essay, and write it down at the test.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @09:42AM
This is true.
Put differently, a test can be vulnerable to rote memorization of answers without being dependent on (or even testing) rote memorization.
Unfortunately, standardized exams which are predominately multiple choice are very vulnerable to rote memorization if the test bank is compromised.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @10:25AM
Unfortunately, standardized exams which are predominately multiple choice are very vulnerable to rote memorization if the test bank is compromised.
Current standardized tests are also very largely dependent on rote memorization. So that makes this problem even worse.
(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.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Thexalon on Thursday August 04 2016, @10:56AM
And of course add to that that most of the test is multiple-choice, which is the second-easiest kind of question to memorize and cheat with.
That said, college admissions officers won't be fooled if a real idiot somehow manages a very high score, because high school grades count far more than standardized tests in most colleges. They also look for other signs that you might be a good student, including your extracurriculars, what classes you took (e.g. AP physics good, remedial pre-algebra bad), your interview if you had one, and your essay. Cheating on the SAT would at best get you past the first screening where many applications are rejected outright for poor grades and test scores, before they've even bothered looking at anything else.
Even if you successfully cheat on everything and manage to get admitted to a school you are not qualified for, after 1 semester odds are you'll be unable to keep up and will end up on academic probation, and then after 2-3 semesters you'll be kicked out.
"Think of how stupid the average person is. Then realize half of 'em are stupider than that." - George Carlin
(Score: 2) by Capt. Obvious on Thursday August 04 2016, @08:28PM
This is why it will be bad for the cheater (unless they can keep cheating throughout college.) But it's also bad for the college and the person who doesn't get in. And, it makes the SATs less useful as a tool. Relying on the long-term self-realization of cheaters that in the long run they're screwed has quite high costs on everyone involved.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @03:46PM
If people are able to cheat the test merely by having the questions, then chances are the test is terrible and relies on rote memorization. This is not appropriate for subjects like mathematics.
Wait, what? How does this even make any sense. I challenge you to name *any* non-athletic test which is not made easier by knowing the question in advance. Literally any test. A cooking challenge (you can look up recipes in advance), an essay (you can research the subject matter and know references, if not outright have an outline or draft), mathematical proofs (you can figure them out in advance), vocabulary (you can look up words you don't know in advance), etc. They might not get 100%, but I guarantee the prepared person will do better.
I literally can't think of a single test in which two students, one knowing the questions in advance and one going in blind, will have a fair comparison.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @09:29AM
I've been interested in the SAT question for a long time.
Here's a refresher if you need it:
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/3/172516-boolean-satisfiability/fulltext [acm.org]
(Score: 4, Insightful) by ledow on Thursday August 04 2016, @11:18AM
I work in schools, in the UK.
A lot of the assessment is now done on computer but, the bit that irks me:
You have a computer. You have Internet access (strictly limited during examinations, but you have the capability to do lots of fancy things in your exam paper).
Why the hell aren't the exam papers generated with randomised questions. Literally, paragraphs from 30 different books, and you're asked to analyse an appropriate theme in that paragraph? Mathematics questions that are set with a range of values for variables, rather than one fixed value, and the computer randomly assigns you a value (and records it at the assessment end, obviously), and grades your answers on the basis of that. Each question is chosen from a random stock of 50+ possible questions across the entire subject range.
This eliminates or diminishes several classes of cheating immediately.
Memorisation of the answers isn't going to help. If you can memorise 30 literary analyses, you don't need to be sitting the exam most likely!
Cribbing from the person next to you - or the person with a phone in a school across the country - is little help. They likely have nothing like the same questions, or even the same format, and they don't have to be listed in the same order and certainly won't have the same answers.
Everything is recordable, modifiable, keeps pupils on their toes, kept within valid ranges, and computer-checked for accuracy.
Appeals, etc. still go through the same system.
And when something like this happens (which would be much more difficult and useless if it did anyway), it's easy to change the ranges, remove the compromised questions and still be in with a good chance of getting all pupils tested on enough questions they've never seen before.
Now, some online testing places have parts of this, but why - for a standardised test (the standardised shouldn't refer to the exact QUESTIONS, but the format, scope, curricula, and marking of those questions) - is this not just done by default nowadays?
Are we really still saying that everyone has to have identical bits of paper with questions drafted months in advance, and that it's a chore to change them if they are revealed (which is more common than you think, there's a news story almost every year where a teacher has opened the exams early and briefed their students on it), and that marking should be as simple as possible because the people marking can't otherwise tell if you've made an error unless the sheet in front of them tells them so?
Sure, online testing brings problems in itself (I work IT in schools, you don't need to tell me!) but it solves so many others.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday August 04 2016, @12:15PM
The test has to be the same for all students, otherwise it's unfair.
If you try to explain to the parents of failure that if there are 100 questions which are an average just as hard, then the overall "hardness" of the different tests is the same, they will not understand, and they will complain repeatedly and loudly.
Also: for exams that actually matter, where you have to think, you cannot randomly generate test problems.
(Score: 2) by Dale on Thursday August 04 2016, @01:31PM
The CPA excam manages different question combinations while maintaining uniformity. I wouldn't hold it up as a model since it is shrouded in secrecy and is a bitch of a test. I simply point out that questions being identical is not a requirement for standardized testing.
(Score: 2) by quintessence on Thursday August 04 2016, @02:52PM
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]
(Score: 2) by GungnirSniper on Thursday August 04 2016, @07:06PM
How does one ensure the wider variety of questions are roughly as difficult as the others?
Tips for better submissions to help our site grow. [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Francis on Thursday August 04 2016, @08:20PM
It depends on the subject. Math is relatively easy to do add you can generate problems that have different numbers, but use the same methods. Humanities questions tend to be harder to generate because there's a lot more nuance to be had.
But really, it's a moot point as the SATs are more about how much money and time you spent preparing than anything useful. I suspect that they're only used as a quick screen for the incompetent, lazy and poor.