The argument that I and some others have been making is more or less as follows:
(1) People and organizations lie, especially about their motives. When a person or organization acts from an ignoble motive, it will often dishonestly claim to have acted from a noble motive.
(2) There is good reason to think that College Board is lying about its reasons for cancelling the registrations of adult test takers. That is, there are good reasons for doubting its professed noble motive of trying to combat cheating. For example (A) there is no reason to believe that adult test takers are more than a negligible factor in SAT cheating and (B) the actions the College Board has taken are not consistent with its stated concerns about cheating; if College Board sincerely believed adult test takers posed a cheating risk, it would presumably have banned them altogether, not just reassigned them to take the test (and presumably to cheat?) on other dates.
(3) Given the College Board’s lack of transparency surrounding this new test version (only four practice tests released when eight were promised; the possible unannounced reintroduction of an experimental section at the last minute) and given its recent history of foul ups (test cancellations, scoring delays, misprints, etc.) an alternative–and, to many people, more plausible–explanation for these cancellations is that the College Board simply wants to avoid large-scale expert scrutiny. This would be the hidden ignoble motive mentioned above.
Why should any of this matter to anyone not directly affected? Well, for one thing, as Plotinus and others have pointed out just above, College Board is now essentially acting as a state contractor: it has been hired and paid by various states to provide testing for the students in those states. Yet at the moment, no one other than children appears eligible to examine the product/service the College Board has been contracted to provide.
If the taxpayers of a state are paying a contractor to provide a service/product, should they not be able to examine the quality of that product/service? If not, why not? In what other context do we simply take a contractor’s own word that it is providing a good service/product without having the opportunity to check for ourselves?
Ideally, as others have suggested above, all tests would simply be released to the public after they were used. The banning of adult test takers, even if it is only temporary, represents a step in the wrong direction–away from openness and toward the use of essentially secret tests.