Does anyone know if this can be done in the US. In the UK you can make a petition on something and if it gets enough signatures it is debated about in parliament. I don’t know how it should be worded but surely something like this would put some pressure on College Board and their terrible customer service.
I don’t think Congress is going to get involved in a private company’s poor customer service.
Agreed with the first post. The best way to stick it to CB is to simply not purchase their tests and go the ACT route. Although you still have to deal with them for AP testing unfortunately…
No, the US doesn’t have anything like that.
I know of only one occasion when the College Board and ETS were forced to do something: in July of 1979 New York state passed Standardized Testing Act, commonly known as Truth-in-Testing law. It required testing companies to provide tests takers with the opportunity to obtain copies of the questions, their answers, correct answers, and the rules for determining their scores.
You can skip a brief account of what followed that piece of legislation.
*In December of 1979 the ETS proclaimed that copies of some previously administered SATs will be generously released to students countrywide. In 1980 the CB, for the first time in the history of the SAT (the first SAT was administered in 1926), released a handful (4) of real SATs and started selling to the reasoning SAT’s takers QASs and SASs three times a year - why not four? and why not complete copies every time? Another why: why did that law did not apply to the SAT Subject Tests? (See my rant about the last mystery as a bigger part of this post: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/19220614/#Comment_19220614; I apologize to the CC community for going off the deep end on an irrelevant topic in that thread)
Apparently, the CB and ETS are free from any accountability because of their non profit status (they also enjoy tax exempt income: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2015/09/30/how-much-do-big-education-nonprofits-pay-their-bosses-quite-a-bit-it-turns-out/).
I don’t (but I would REALLY like to) know who was the driving force behind groundbreaking Truth-in-Testing law, but I doubt that any petition played a role in it.
*historical data was mostly found on Erik Jacobsen’ SAT/ACT website.
Also, there was the Fairtest gender bias lawsuit settled in 1997. The settlement resulting in the addition of the Writing portion of the PSAT and SAT. http://www.fairtest.org/gender-gap-narrows-revised-psat
It used to be quite common to “write your congressman” for help with problems with large companies who tried to overpower individuals. Now with the growth of regulatory agencies you would report an abusive practice to an agency. Given the virtual monopoly College Board and ACT have, it seems that they are asking for regulators to step in on behalf of consumers. The last year has been a disaster for both agencies and there isn’t much hope for college board through at least October. We still have the new SAT to deal with and a disaster looming on national merit cutoffs in September.
I think the most likely thing that would interest a Congressperson about of all of the issues is the reuse of tests internationally which allows for cheating and allows international students to gain admission to American schools. To the point that those students are viewed as “taking their constituents spots” they might care. But the question is really whether the schools would take those international students even with lower scores because they are full pay so the cheating doesn’t result in a net loss of spots for Americans.