SAT Epic Fail in Oakland

Wjs1107
Sun, 02 Jun 2024 14:44:33 +0000

Our public high school administers another CB product, AP exams. I’m a trained proctor and have been administering tests every spring for years as a volunteer. I take a vacation day to do this as it’s 4-5 hours a day —again, lucky that I can do that.

I don’t blame my public high school for not seeing the value in doing this task again/all year for SAT testing, when they are very clearly geared toward satisfying UC/CSU requirements and that system is test blind. It is a huge undertaking to do the AP testing where 900 of our students take 1-5 exams. They are constantly looking for and training more volunteers, upending the organization of tables and rooms to accommodate the tests and meet the needs of students with accommodations, the paperwork is insane, and the pressure is high. Of course other places do this on the regular, but when you have to do all of this at your school’s expense, and your public school system feeds into a test blind public college system, I guess it’s not surprising that it ends up this way.

Perhaps the colleges that want scores should be obligated to host and manage the SAT. I don’t feel it is my problem to solve but I do pay money for my kid to take this test and there is a huge market in the Bay Area, full of high school students who want to take the test. College Board is a business that seemingly has a pretty tight hold on west coast testing (the ACT is not widely given here either). I would be equally happy if some competition came along and gave us more choice, more flexibility and more reliability.