Digital tests are weak.
The College Board announced April 15 that if schools do not reopen this fall due to the novel coronavirus pandemic, it will administer an online, take-at-home version of the Standard Aptitude Test (SAT). Although the College Board claimed that the virtual test would be secure and fair, many critics, including university professors, education experts and teachers, have voiced concerns about the validity of the new test. The College Board should not give virtual SATs because the integrity of the test will be compromised.
Currently, the coronavirus pandemic has created a difficult environment for some students to study and prepare for the SAT, as students have more private concerns outside of their school work. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), as of April 30, there have been more than 1.1 million cases and 63,733 deaths in the United States. The sheer volume of infected Americans suggests that many students with sick family members now have to take on more responsibilities around the house, such as cooking, cleaning and taking care of younger siblings. Thus, they won’t have the ability to delegate time to studying for the SAT.
Another obstacle to virtual testing is the accessibility of technology in poorer neighborhoods, which mainly affects students of low socioeconomic statuses, who are already at a disadvantage when it comes to standardized tests. The College Board has promised to provide devices to anyone who needs one, but it cannot feasibly purchase and distribute devices to all of the 1.5 million American students who do not have a personal computer at home. Worse, according to the Voice of America, twice the aforementioned number of students do not have access to broadband internet. Although the College Board has given guidelines regarding the lack of devices, they have not given any as to how they will combat the lack of accessibility to wifi.
More importantly, the College Board cannot guarantee the integrity of digital SATs. There are numerous ways to cheat on the internet, such as Mathway.com, which allows students to input a math problem and receive an answer within seconds, and Quizlet, which provides free study sets that can be used during the test. Although Advanced Placement (AP) tests were modified this year to be free-response questions to prevent cheating, this approach is improbable for the SAT because SAT test scores reflect the number of correct questions while AP tests are about reaching a certain threshold. Although there are rumors that the College Board will discourage cheating by monitoring students with video cameras, this is unlikely because it is not possible for them to hire proctors for each of the three million students that take the test each year.
Cheating on a digital SAT is unfair not only for students who took the test at physical locations, but also to the students who decide to cheat. Awarding cheaters with a higher score than they deserve teaches them that they can compromise their study habits and still accept scores they didn’t work for. It is also unjust because their scores could be higher than the scores of students who took the test at secure test centers, which might decrease the credibility of SAT results in future college applications. The digital SATs present too many obstacles and unfair advantages to be properly implemented. The best choice would be to cancel all SATs, both physical and virtual, and to resume them after the pandemic is resolved. Maintaining the integrity of the SAT should be the College Board’s top priority.