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Why do we give the College Board so much power?
On Twitter this Tuesday, Jon Boeckenstedt took the College Board to task for the way it has handled both the AP and the SAT tests over the last few months. The short version is that it reduced the AP to 45 minutes and declared, without evidence or even asking, that it was just as good as before and should be accepted on the same terms. Now it’s “calling on our member institutions and local communities to open their doors and provide additional test center capacity” for SATs after discovering limited buy-in for the “take home” version. Again, it’s asserting without apparent evidence that the scores on this exam will be directly comparable to the ones on the established one, and asking us all to believe it and act accordingly.
Boeckenstedt characterized the College Board as “narcissistic” and its actions toward students, high schools and colleges as abusive. It’s abusive in the sense that when it makes these absurd demands, it puts the folks on the receiving end of those demands in a no-win situation. Accept it and you get an inferior product or experience. Reject it and you’re the bad guy for denying access. Heads they win, tails you lose.
His analysis rang true for me, because we’ve been dealing with similar issues around the Accuplacer. For those who don’t know, the Accuplacer is the College Board’s test for placing students into, or out of, remedial courses in reading, English and math. Last fall it changed the Accuplacer without bothering to issue concordance tables with previous scores, so colleges that used it had to pick scores out of the clear blue sky. We did, got some of them wrong and had to do a midyear adjustment -- at considerable and unreimbursed cost in staff time and effort -- to get the scores closer to reality. This spring, shortly after we had to move all operations off campus, Accuplacer lost its ability to administer exams remotely. For a couple of weeks, we had no placement method at all; all we got from the College Board was an email saying a decision on how to proceed would be forthcoming.
Great. You know what else is forthcoming? The entering class for the fall. Not cool.
Finally, it came back with a recommendation that colleges do their own remote proctoring via Zoom.
It’s almost as if there’s a … pattern …
That was patently unacceptable -- who has the staff for that? -- so we had to scramble to find another approach for placement. Students had already started applying for the fall, and we can’t keep them in limbo forever. I made a pitch internally for directed student self-placement, but folks were too flustered to try something that seemed so radical. Instead, we adopted a version of multifactor placement involving high school transcripts, ALEKS and homegrown essay prompts. That involved settling a contract for ALEKS, developing writing prompts, recruiting graders and training staff to decode high school transcripts. (We have over 60 districts in our county, plus private schools, plus out-of-county, and no two districts do it the same way.) As a community college, we never put the resources into the admissions office that a selective school would, because there was no reason to. Now, thanks to Accuplacer’s latest face plant, we’re figuring out on the fly how to do a much more labor-intensive placement process during a period of catastrophic state budget cuts and a pandemic. That cost us more time, which may have cost us some enrollments.
Why are we doing this?
The common denominator to all of these failures on the College Board’s part is its complete indifference to students, high schools, parents and colleges. It failed, then dithered, then tried to pawn off the entire burden of labor onto us, while keeping revenues for itself. Meanwhile, our fall enrollment -- even more important than ever, given the collapse of state funding -- is at stake. If we lose enrollment because of a backlog in placement, I don’t foresee the College Board bailing us out. But we’re supposed to bail it out by providing free labor at the exact moment that the state has literally eliminated our funding.
Um, no.
For colleges that survive all of this, I foresee an aggressive move toward directed self-placement. For high schools, I predict a hard shift from the AP to dual enrollment. We don’t have the systems or staff to maintain robust multifactor placement over time, and I can’t imagine high schools reacting well when colleges balk at the 45-minute AP exam. Standardized tests were never especially accurate, and their biases along lines of race and income are persistent and well-known. Those reasons for deep skepticism were already established. Their one major selling point was simplicity of comparison. Now they don’t even have that.
Enough. Narcissists can be neither trusted nor cured. But they can be escaped. It’s time.
