Feed: Slashdot
Feed Link: https://slashdot.org/
---

Title: College Board Keeps Apologizing For Screwing Up Digital SAT and AP
Tests

Link: https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/05/23/2012...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Nate
Anderson: Don't worry about the "mission-driven not-for-profit" College Board
-- it's drowning in cash. The US group, which administers the SAT and AP
tests to college-bound students, paid its CEO $2.38 million in total
compensation in 2023 (the most recent year data is available). The senior VP
in charge of AP programs made $694,662 in total compensation, while the
senior VP for Technology Strategy made $765,267 in total compensation. Given
such eye-popping numbers, one would have expected the College Board's
transition to digital exams to go smoothly, but it continues to have issues.
Just last week, the group's AP Psychology exam was disrupted nationally when
the required "Bluebook" testing app couldn't be accessed by many students.
Because the College Board shifted to digital-only exams for 28 of its 36 AP
courses beginning this year, no paper-based backup options were available.
The only "solution" was to wait quietly in a freezing gymnasium, surrounded
by a hundred other stressed-out students, to see if College Board could get
its digital act together. [...] College Board issued a statement on the day
of the AP Psych exam, copping to "an issue that prevented [students] from
logging into the College Board's Bluebook testing application and beginning
their exams at the assigned local start time." Stressing that "most students
have had a successful testing experience, with more than 5 million exams
being successfully submitted thus far," College Board nonetheless did "regret
that their testing period was disrupted." It's not the first such disruption,
though. [...] College Board also continues to have problems delivering
digital testing at scale in a high-pressure environment. During the SAT exam
sessions on March 8-9, 2025, more than 250,000 students sat for the test --
and some found that their tests were automatically submitted before the
testing time ended. College Board blamed the problem on "an incorrectly
configured security setting on Bluebook." The problem affected nearly 10,000
students, and several thousand more "may have lost some testing time if they
were asked by their room monitor to reboot their devices during the test to
fix and prevent the auto-submit error." College Board did "deeply and
sincerely apologize to the students who were not able to complete their
tests, or had their test time interrupted, for the difficulty and frustration
this has caused them and their families." It offered refunds, plus a free
future SAT testing voucher.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

---
VRSS v2.1.180528