I attended the NACAC (National Association for College Admission Counseling) conference in Columbus, Ohio the last few days and had the opportunity to hear an interview of David Coleman, head of the College Board. It was a fairly hostile crowd of mostly high school college counselors and there was also an opportunity for questions from the audience. This was my first time seeing Coleman speak and the conversation was very interesting.
He apologized for the Board's betrayal of the trust of parents, students, and guidance counselors and made the following commitments.
1) Counselors will get access to PSAT scores (in online form) a week in advance of students
2) They are working to redesign the access portal which he admitted was poorly designed.
3) They realized that they took everything online without giving counselors time to adjust and so this year they will provide counselors with both paper reports and online reports to help them make the transition.
4) Any student who receives a fee waiver for the exam will get fee waiver incorporated into profile which will allow four free waivers for college apps thus eliminating the need for students to have to keep proving that they need financial help.
5) 2018 concordance will be jointly issued with ACT.
He said that SAT was no longer in any way an aptitude test. That it was now entirely an achievement test designed to conform with what is required for success in college. That the English portion of the exam would routinely require students to interpret documents that framed the US (Const., Dec. of Independence), which they should already be familiar with. 3 areas of math that are most important for college comprise 80% of the math exam. The PSAT has the same blueprint as the SAT. Although SAT is now achievement focused like ACT, they allow for more time per question which Coleman believes is important (he would like to eliminate the time component altogether if possible). He said that the goal of the new SAT was to measure those few things which if you can't do well you will have trouble catching up in college.
He recognized that their customer service department was not working. He admitted that the system was broken and must change.
When asked about test security, he said that the cost to eliminate all test repetition would be extremely expensive, but that is something they need to work towards. He said that they are trying to be less blunt and use more analytics to address problems with cheating to avoid punishing groups for the actions of individuals.
He acknowledged that some of the math problems were still too wordy (although he did not believe that had impacted results) and said that they would continue to work to simplify the math problems, but keep them rooted in reality.
In response to a question, he said that they would look into whether they should also be changing subject tests to 4 answers and no guessing penalty model.
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