SAT II test: a familiar sight
June 10, 2002
As two juniors delved into an SAT II Math IC test, a college admission exam, on June 2, they received an interesting surprise. The test they were taking was very familiar. They recognized anywhere from 41 to 47 out of 50 problems as having been on practice tests they received from their separate SAT II tutors. “When I opened the test I started shaking because the questions were so similar to a test I had already taken with my tutor,” said one of the students. However, College Board, the agency that administers the SAT, does not print tests for public use that will be used later as actual tests. According to Steve Kotten, Director of SAT Operations and Communications for College Board, “there is no way for anyone to have a copy of the test. Only through illegal actions could anybody get a live form of the test—through copyright violations.” The students, whose names have been withheld upon their request, have reported the matter to the College Board. Ned Johnson, President of PrepMatters, the SAT tutoring service that distributed the practice test to both students, faxed a statement to The Lion’s Tale on June 7, three days after being interviewed by the newspaper for this article stating that an “error in judgment was made.” According to the statement, “Staff members from PrepMatters periodically take admissions tests in order to determine how the tests have changed so we [PrepMatters] can provide current concepts to our clients. . . In this instance, an error in judgment was made in which actual problems from a previously administered exam were given to a small number of students for practice.” The SAT II tests, which measure knowledge of a particular subject, are often used more than once, but should not be available to the public prior to the actual test. The SAT I test measures reasoning abilities, according to the registration bulletin. “For all the SAT tests, there is a schedule for which we rotate tests in and out of national use,” said Kotten. “Basically, a live test form could be used more than once, but we scatter how we use it so it is very unlikely that a student would see the same test more than once. We do take certain security measures to make it very unlikely for a student to see an SAT II test before it is given.” Kotten said that “it is very time consuming to put together SAT II tests, and at this point there are only so many forms of the test that we can afford to produce.” In preparing for the SAT II, students can take the practice tests printed in Real SAT II: Subject Tests, a book published by College Board. These are old exams no longer in use for official testing and are the only copies of tests that College Board releases to the public. The registration bulletin distributed by College Board for the SAT for this year states that “Misconduct includes . . . obtaining improper access to the test, a part of the test, or information about the test.” In addition, “cheating includes having access to test questions before the exam.” In addition to the two students who received the practice test from their tutoring service, five others who took the Math IC test on June 2,were shown the PrepMatters practice test during interviews for this article. All five of the students interviewed verified that anywhere from 32 through all 50 questions on the actual test were almost the same as those on the practice test. There have been cases in the past at the local and national level of misuse of testing materials. “We had an instance last spring where some tutors got hold of a live form because somebody had copied the test at a test center,” said Kotten. “This photocopied version of a biology test was passed around from tutor to tutor and student to student. That test was eliminated, and we gave over a thousand make up exams. Those culpable are being prosecuted.” Five years ago, federal officials cracked down on “an elaborately organized band of test-takers [who] exploited time-zone differences in the administration of some of the nation’s most important college admission exams” including the GMAT, the GRE and the Test of English as a Foreign Language. Test-takers involved in the scheme had paid as much as $9,000 to get the scores they wanted, according to a Sept. 1997 Washington Post article. In addition, six years earlier, a student at Winston Churchill High School in Potomac “became the first in the nation to be sentenced to jail for an SAT cheating scheme,” according to the Post. The student “was convicted of perjury and drew six months in jail for lying under oath about the fact that he had paid a friend $200 to take his SAT.” Roslyn Johnson, Director of Study Works for the Northern Region, a tutoring service that prepares students only for SAT I, explained that there is a lot of pressure today to get high scores on the SAT exams. “It’s so competitive and people think that you need close to a 1,600 to go to a ‘good’ school, which is not always the case,” she said. Bob Schaeffer, Public Education Director of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, a watchdog group, expressed a similar opinion. “Students, in part because of the advertising of tutoring companies, and because of what they see in the news believe that they cannot get into a good college unless they have high scores,” he said. According to Schaeffer, it is difficult to prevent misuse of the SAT II tests. “ETS has systems of control, but there have been cases [of misconduct] in the past, and the system is not flawless. When you are dealing with hundreds of copies of exams, in order to have perfect secrecy, you need perfect document control,” he explained. The SAT I is a three-hour, primarily multiple choice test that measures verbal and mathematical reasoning abilities, while the SAT IIs are one-hour subject tests that measure a student’s knowledge of particular subjects and the ability to apply that knowledge. While some students might be thrilled to have received an advanced copy of an SAT II test, the juniors who did receive a similar copy, were not. “I felt like I was doing something morally wrong. I was given an advantage on a test with no intentions on my part of getting an advantage,” said one of the students tutored at PrepMatters. “It made me feel like a cheater when I didn’t cheat.” |
