NEW YORK - JUNE 27: SAT test preparation books sit on a shelf at a Barnes and Noble store June 27, ... [+]
On the morning of the June ACT, Janet Godwin, ACT’s CEO, wasn’t in her office overseeing one of the largest administrations of the year. She was at a three star hotel in Atlanta hobnobbing with members of the test preparation industry. Godwin and an executive from the College Board were at the 2nd annual conference of a test preparation industry association. While it’s not uncommon for test prep tutors to attend test publisher conferences, it’s highly unusual for the senior executives from the test makers to accept an invitation from a group that David Coleman, the College Board’s CEO, called “predators who prey on the anxieties of parents and children and provide no real educational benefit.”
What does it mean that ACT’s CEO is giving a keynote address, attending education sessions, and schmoozing at happy hour with high priced tutors and the College Board executive is giving the test coaches early insights into the forthcoming cyber SAT? It means that test preparation “predators” have brought the test publishers to heel.
Admissions test preparation came into existence in the 1930s, just years after the first SAT in 1926. From those early days until the 1980s, most prep companies were local shops who lived off the tests the way remoras live off sharks.
The College Board and the Educational Testing Service, which actually wrote the SAT until 2016, took great pains to rebut any report that suggested test preparation could lead to large score gains, since by its own admission, “If the board's test can be regularly beaten through coaching, then the board is itself discredited." Despite the test publishers' arguments, test preparation continued to attract customers looking to improve their scores.
The relationship between publishers and preppers became more heated when John Katzman, founder of The Princeton Review, entered the fray in 1981. Katzman’s public attacks on the SAT, ETS, and the College Board not only helped speed the growth of his test prep company but also directly challenged the quality and value of the tests. Unlike earlier test preparation providers, Katzman focused on convincing parents of the "beatability" of the test and the need for specialized preparation, moving the conversation of the test’s value from academic conferences to PTA meetings.
Prior to Katzman, the primary opponents of the tests were academics and admissions officers at small northeastern liberal arts colleges like Bowdoin and Hampshire
College Board's 1986 10 SATs told students to decide for themselves where prep was worth the time, ... [+]
Colleges, who adopted test optional practices prior to 1980. The emergence of the Princeton Review began eroding popular belief in the tests and forced the publishers to defend their products not only to academics but to suburban moms as well. An ETS president said, in 1980, "The existence of the coaching schools is nothing more than the triumph of hope over reality." Test registration booklets began to include the message that “expensive coaching courses'' required time, money, and effort and thus could not be recommended.
The enmity between the two camps might have been good for education as a whole with each segment acting as a check against the other. Test publishers have sued test prep organizations and helped catch cheaters. Test prep companies have been watchdogs on the test makers and each other, exposing leaked tests, bad test questions, problematic policies and practices, and false accusations of cheating.
But the potential for the two sides of the testing industry to act in concert to improve outcomes for students has never been realized. Test publishers responded to criticism and test optional policies by making the test valuable as a lead generation tool for colleges. Test prep for its part will always be an engine of inequality and unfairness, reselling insight and support to whoever can pay the fee. Let’s not forget that at the heart of almost every test cheating scandal has been a test preparation company or tutor.
The arguments between the coaches and publishers settled for a period but were reinvigorated in 2014 when The College Board’s CEO, David Coleman, announced the 15th version of the SAT and a partnership with Khan Academy to deliver what he called a technology “that has broken down the racial divisions that so haunt this nation.”
Capture from David Coleman's Delivering Opportunity speech in 2014 in Austin, TX
“It is time for the College Board to say in a clear voice that the culture and practice of costly test preparation … drives the perception of inequality and injustice in our country,” Coleman said. “It may not be our fault but it is our problem.” Coleman promised he would end the expensive preparation industry, which he blamed for the “perception” that the SAT contributes to inequality.
Perhaps to address the “perception of inequality,” both ACT and the College Board have offered more and more test preparation products and in recent years have focused on trying to present those products as pathways to equitable preparedness for the tests.
The College Board developed a free program with Khan Academy, originally marketed as “world-class test-prep” but soon after changed to “practice” to distance it from test prep. Soon after the College Board’s Official SAT prep launched, ACT began offering a free ACT Academy but within three years quietly discontinued its free test prep product in favor of its own paid instructor certification program and a reseller relationship with Kaplan Test Prep.
These inconsistencies highlight the struggle of the test publishers to find an effective answer to the continued growth of the test preparation industry and the decreased faith in their core products. Nowhere are those inconsistencies more clear than in the messaging about the test publishers' own online video prep offerings, which both ACT and SAT find highly effective, versus the test publishers' comment about commercial test preparation classes and tutoring, which test publishers consistently find ineffective.
The presence of the publishers at the test prep conference sends a very clear signal that where they once might have been driven by a mission to deliver evidence-based, research-driven assessments they were now primarily salesmen, doing everything possible to sell a product and generate leads for college recruiters.
The merging of test publishers and test preparation appears to be not only an admission that test preparation works but also the defanging of some of the most knowledgeable critics of the test. Absent the test prep industry, the only organization that regularly monitors the practice and process of large scale testing would be the small non-profit advocacy organization The National Center for Fair and Open Testing (full disclosure: I work at FairTest and have been a test prep tutor for 30 years).
When asked for comment Godwin replied “ACT is committed to an equitable testing process that helps all students succeed. . . . ACT will continue to engage and collaborate with education stakeholders who have opportunities to improve the learning experience for all, especially if they help facilitate more equitable access.”
While it's entirely possible that a relationship between test prep and test makers might yield positive outcomes for students. In fact, I attended two such conferences at ACT headquarters where the discussion centered on process and procedures that could improve student outcomes, fee waiver processes, etc. The test prep conference on the other hand is a business and marketing event that will let the test prep industry boast about their coziness with the test makers, gain insider information about the digital SAT, and better sell their wares. The more frightening outcome could be that certain prep companies would gain information that allowed them to subvert all security and provide access to test materials to their clients.
In 1999, Don Powers, a research scientist with ETS, said “If we were to find that the tests were highly coachable in a relatively short period of time it would undermine the validity claims about what these tests measure.'' Since then the number of colleges that do not require the SAT or ACT has risen from a mere handful to more than 80% of four year colleges. The test publishers no longer seem concerned that support of test preparation will undermine the validity of their exams, instead they’ve decided to join forces with the only other group that benefits from the expansion of admissions tests.
June 2022 marks the date when the test publishers, having failed to undermine the credibility of the test prep coaches or to create the promised “bad day” for the test preparation industry, decided to save their tests by legitimizing the “predators.”
