Plus, such a restriction would be close to free,ever helpful these days.
My point is allow the choice of testing center to everyone or to no one. I don’t want CB deciding if it is a good reason or a made up one, just allow it for everyone or no one.
@twoinanddone - agreed - and choice is currently allowed for everyone. At least I assume it is…my teens have the option of choosing their test centers when they sign up for the exams via CB, so I am assuming everyone else does too.
And that is one reason fraud is so easy to occur. The current defendants are not the only ones shopping for favorable testing sites.
In our town of 200,000 residents, not one of the high schools signs up to provide/proctor testing. Our kids must go to neighboring towns, where ‘no one knows their name’. (sorry, Cheers fans)
Even the proctors at the testing high schools are not necessarily teachers/staff at that HS.
btw: local colleges, including UC’s, also sign up as testing centers.
So isn’t the way to fix that to require the home schools to offer the test? And to provide the paid proctors?
The home schools do manage to offer and proctor whatever state mandated tests there are for their students. Add this one in.
Huh? Who is gonna make that mandate? (Feds? State?)
(You gonna require that every HS in country open on a Saturday morning when what may be a small portion of the students actually want to test that day? Don’t forget that in the inner city, few kids are going to a four-year Uni.)
Proctors are paid today, perhaps not enough, but they are paid by CB/ACT.
I dont see an away site as the problem. Rather, how that was used for cheating. By some.
Does an away site facilitate cheating? Not necessarily.
Is there an issue with proctors? Apparently, some.
Thing is, it’s not easy to know when someone had too much help. Or is faking a role. You dont throw the baby out with the bathwater. You don’t rely on restrictions on top of restrictions to try to plug a hole. First, you see what can be done now. First, you get the right idea of what the real weakness or loophole actually is. Otherwise, you could be bandaid-ing the wrong pieces.
I went to two different high schools, both the biggest in those states at that time, and neither offered the tests. In one case the state universities didn’t require the tests for few takers, and in the other the school was SOOO big that they always had a ton of stuff going on so just didn’t schedule the tests. Plenty of other schools in the area to take the tests. They didn’t offer them at the schools my kids went to either, one a smaller private school, the others public but of different sizes. My daughter went to a k-12 school that only had 25 students in each grade, so they would be forced to open up for 8-10 students testing at a time?
Of course there is fraud. If only ‘special’ students could test outside their home schools, there would be even more because those who can afford trips to California and Florida could also pay for students to take the exams.
I don’t think CB cares to stop the fraud. They pretend they do, but if they really cared they’d shut down the testing centers involved in these cases, and they’ve made no effort to do even that. They’d have ‘special conditions’ centers and send all those needing 1.5x the time to those, so that the whole center was on that time and no special proctors needed.
Not all high schools necessarily want to be testing centers. When I went to high school, the high school I attended was not a testing center for any standardized tests, even though at least a third of the students took them (since about a third of the graduates went to four year colleges that required them). So we had to take the standardized tests at other high schools (not in the same school district) that were testing centers.
This is correct. It continues to be a problem now as it has previously: available sites, dates, personnel to administer, security, and more.
It could make sense for College Board test security automatically to flag and investigate the following scores:
- extra time who take the test at a distant location.
- travel to a distant location with significant score increases.
- significant score increases all testing at the same center.
I agree with people who said that testing away from home should not be suspicious in itself. However, the students in the scam were not just traveling AWAY from home – they were traveling TO the same two test centers controlled by Singer. And they had multiple-day extended time.
I have only known one student who qualified for multiple-day testing and taking the test was a major drama for him. I find it implausible that parents would pile a trip on top of the stress of the test for their child with a severe learning disability. It should raise flags.
I have seen many students with 50% extended time, quite a few of whom had no learning disability I could detect while teaching them. The students with detectable learning disabilities never scored in the Ivy League range, even with extended time. They generally went from abysmal scores to average or near average scores. The students who scored very well were always the ones who seemed to me to have the same learning skills as average students without learning disabilities. I don’t know if this is just my personal experience, or if it is generally or usually the case that students with real learning disabilities don’t score that well even with extended time. Maybe other people with more knowledge about this could weigh in.
I agree that students with real learning disabilities should get extended time, but the current system makes it much too easy for normal students to get extended time by paying off a psychologist, with the complicity of the school gc. In practice, the current extra-time system becomes another boost for wealthy students with unscrupulous parents. Maybe students who score in the 90th percentile or above with extended time should be required to have their learning disabilities certified by a second psychologist approved by CB.
Testing for learning disorders is a grueling, discouraging, expensive, multiple day process that many kids already endure at least twice. The learning differences generally show up in 2nd or 3rd grade. Students have to be tested to get appropriate accommodations in primary and secondary school. Students who want accommodations in college are required to have recent testing (within 2-3 years), so they have to endure the process all over again. This is after years of living with those differences on a daily basis. It’s not their issue that some segments of society are unwilling to accept their scores, and targeting them, specifically, to make them follow a different set of rules is a violation of their rights under the ADA.
The test companies are already canceling the scores of perfectly honest students who had score increases, and families are losing arbitration appeals arranged by the testing companies while blatant cheating goes unpunished. The testing companies, and any neuropsychologists they hire, have a conflict of interest. I don’t trust them to be fair to neurotypical kids. I certainly wouldn’t give them any additional power over those with learning disorders.
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Seriously, most other countries manage college entrance exams with far less drama and far fewer exceptions. In 20 states, all public school students take the SAT, in 14 states, the ACT, as part of the regular curriculum, and somehow those states and schools seem to manage the testing in the home schools just fine; it really doesn’t have to be that complicated. If Mississippi can accomplish it, I am confident the rest can as well.
College Board limits how many tests sites can be in an area and doesn’t allow every school to be a site even if they want to. The school I work at is an ACT test site, and we have asked College Board several times to become an SAT site as well. College Board always tells us that they have enough test sites in our area (a large city and state capital, so not a tiny place), and that they will only add additional ones if numbers warrant it. Proctors are paid by the testing companies, not by the hosting school, so they will not want to pay for more test sites than necessary.
This may be true, but I have seen tons of students who first tested for learning differences after a poor PSAT result in 10th or even 11th grade and who then are awarded extra time on the basis of this testing.
What percentage of students with real learning disabilities do you think score in the 90th percentile or above?
My hypothesis was that this would be a relatively small percentage so that mostly the fakers would be subjected to additional testing. Also, the prospect of additional testing might serve as a deterrent so that the fakers would not apply for extra time from the start. Maybe this is not the best way to screen out fakers, but some further screening is warranted. The present system is absurdly unfair to students who test with regular time. These students have rights to a fair testing process too.
A simple solution is to mark any test score achieved through extra time as such in the official report. After all, if a student has truly learning disabilities, colleges are entitled to know this.
“if a student has truly learning disabilities, colleges are entitled to know this.”
As a matter of law, this is incorrect.