The College Board’s reaction to this development has been befuddling. In 2013, Reuters reported, the company knowingly administered an SAT test in China with materials that had already leaked onto Chinese message boards, where its questions were extensively discussed and answered. Stronger security measures, meanwhile, seem to have little effect. Earlier this month, the contents of an SAT exam given in the United States appeared on the Internet a few days later.
The U.S. Department of Education chose to allow private companies to judge us as students and this is what happens. No, the government isn’t immune to hacking but I never took the S.A.T. test in school. I don’t support a private company that makes a test, sells books on how to pass the test, supplies practice tests and likely also has online cram-courses for sale as well. Basically, you can spend hundreds toward one company to pass the test they wrote, a test that will effectively gets you in to any school you want if you do very well.
It’s criminal, it’s corrupt and I will not support it.
My hope is the company’s hacking issues lead to schools waking up about this and making their own national standardized assessment test. Or, we could instead grade our children not in the laziest way possible (a $25 privately created test that rates them against their peers) but instead admit them to higher-education based on their accomplishments, dreams, ambitions and 1:1 interviews. We take the easiest route and shouldn’t when it comes to education. Developed European countries provide higher education to their students. We should do that as well.