Anyone who has applied for college has probably taken several SAT tests, AP tests, and have spent an arm and a leg for them. College Board has had control over the college admissions process for years. Millions of students take the tests and thousands of schools depended on the scores for their applications.
A year into the pandemic, the dependency on these tests have disappeared. College board is struggling to keep tests scheduled and failing to notify students of cancellations. After all, having to go to a testing site with hundreds of other students is not the optimal situation for a pandemic. As a result of the coronavirus, nearly 1.5 million students have not been able to take their SAT test this year resulting in 1600 universities cancelling their SAT requirement in their admissions process.
The pandemic was not kind to AP tests either. With the nationwide lock down in the spring when tests are administered, College Board had no choice but to make the tests virtual which they poorly executed. Thousands of students experienced glitches in their tests where they were unable to submit their answers and were forced to retake the tests again. As a result, a $500 million lawsuit was filed claiming College Board violated many things such as breech of contract.
The disasters College Board has dealt with have forced them to make changes by removing the SAT essay and subject tests. Even prior to the pandemic, many deemed these tests as useless. Very few schools required the essay portion of the SAT and people felt that the AP tests served a similar purpose to the subject tests. College board is hopeful that these changes will aid them in making the SAT test appealing again and that the changes may help them work towards a virtual SAT test.
It is no surprise that the loss of any testing for students is also a loss of revenue for the College Board. If 1.5 million students had each paid $50 for their cancelled tests, then College Board would have had an extra $75 million in extra revenue from the SAT tests alone in 2020.
All of these issues have led to people questioning the future of college admissions. If universities are finding a way to judge applicants without the SAT requirement, will they really need to go back to requiring them? The lawsuit, loss of revenue, and SAT issues mean it is no secret that College Board is struggling. Time will tell whether the system finds their testing as valuable as they once did.
Wow! This is such a crucial and important blog post for today’s day and age. Personally, I am not a fan of the College Board because, as you stated, AP exams and SATs are unreasonably expensive (not to mention I am not the best test-taker). Stories like this exhibit the several “perks” of the pandemic; for students that have a high GPA, but are not as strong in their ability to take college-entry exams, they may have a leg-up on their fellow applicants, if colleges are not requiring SAT scores.
I’m a bit jealous of all the kids applying who don’t have to do as many standardized tests, but I also would not have wanted to do more than I had to of COVID high school. So it probably balances. It certainly is interesting though to think about the sheer about of money College Board can make off of a single test (and where they spend it). My AP Physics teacher wrote for College Board, and he used to tell us about how much money College Board would spend to fly teachers out for grading or writing exams, or even brain storming exams.