While it is strictly not a monopoly, the College Board certainly has an extremely strong grip on the standardized testing business, with SATs being de rigueur among high school students. In light of the recent rash of discovered scoring errors, would it be better for there to be more competition in this area, in order to encourage improvement in the administration and scoring (and pricing, especially for the $90-each AP tests) of the test? Or would having several different standards only work to the detriments of the students?
Full disclosure: I am a high school senior who incorrectly recieved a score 20 points (the horror, yes, I know) on the SATII Chemistry exam. While the error was discovered, it was trying to ensure that the colleges to which I applied were aware of the correction.
So… in the end, there were 18 low scores out of some 400,000?
Things wil always go wrong. From everything I’ve read, the ETS takes great pains to make the system as reliable and transparent as possible. When I was studying for the GRE, I found a report on the ETS website about them trying everything they could to fool the computer based essay marker and exactly how well each method worked. Oddly enough, most of the private sites purporting to sell you information on how to pass the GRE had much less info on it than the ETS website.
There are already multiple standards. The only non-College-Board test I know of is the ACT. There’s a conversion chart that students and schools can use to figure out how good a particular ACT score is, by relating it to an equivalent SAT score. Colleges would have to take some time looking at each of the standard tests, and deciding whether they tested students on something worthwhile (“Yes, we think that test is a good indicator of whether we want you at our school or not.” or “No, that test doesn’t demonstrate what we’re looking for.”) and then determine what each score means for them (i.e. which score corresponds to “definitely accepted,” “probably accepted,” etc.) - it would be a lot of extra work if there were dozens of tests, but five or six might not be too horrendous.
There are a lot more than 18 low scores. Not only that, the problem was not revealed for months after it was discovered.
The College Board is not equivalent to ETS. ETS is a contractor for the College Board. In fact, the problem happened when the College Board moved the scoring away from ETS to another contractor in Texas.
My old landlady used to work for ETS, and it was down the road from where I used to work.
