Last week I had written about the David Leonhardt article in the NY Times (if you haven’t seen it by now, don’t bother, as the statistics it cites have been widely dismissed by people who know the reality), in which I suggested that it was yet another College Board plant, where they pre-deliver a nice little package to a friendly journalist who just runs with it. The lack of differing opinion of any substance is always your first clue. Leonhardt cites the California Faculty Senate study (which mentions College Board over 50 times, but does not cite a rebuttal by the person who has done more research on UC students and the SAT than anyone, for instance.)

The College Board will always kick its PR machine into high gear when it feels threatened, but now it seems it’s more an attempt to salvage what is left of its increasingly irrelevant product, the SAT. Leonhardt was an undergraduate at Yale at the same time as College Board CEO David Coleman. Pure coincidence, of course. (I want to stress that I have no proof of this, and it’s just my opinion, although the evidence seems strong.)

This week, there were at least two more articles that sound a lot like the ones College Board pitches. But first, some context, so you can see how the headlines support the College Board position.

They do this a lot. They did it in 2001, when Richard Atkinson, who was the president of the UC system and an expert on educational measurement, took the SAT, discovered what an awful test it was, and worked to eliminate it as a requirement on the campus.

They did it when they took out a full page ad in the Atlantic disguised as an editorial.

They did it in 2016 when the College Board PR team was thanked in a “research book” for all their hard work and effort; and even though the lead architect of the “new and improved SAT” was one of the authors, they made claims not supported by the data tables they published. Paul Tough, who exposed this in his book, laid it out here:

The PR Team hit a new low when it produced a video of College Board Trustees telling students they had a duty to take AP exams during COVID. This was either right before or right after someone at College Board told a kid with no wi-fi to take the exam in a parking lot at McDonald’s using their free wi-fi. Revenue uber alles.

They did it recently when they flat out lied about caving to the state of Florida, one of their biggest customers, on the AP African-American Studies course.

They shamelessly tried to seize the opportunity to promote their AP exams on the back of the mass shooting of students at Parkland High School.

And they recycle the same old concepts they plant with journalists, who buy it. I did a long screed on that here, but if you just want a summary:

1. The tests are standardized and thus fair because everyone takes the same exam. 
2. The “Diamond in the Rough” (DITR) theory.
3. Grade inflation makes grades meaningless, and thus we need tests.
4. Don’t blame the tests for telling the cold hard truth. They’re just a tool.
5. Removing the tests doesn’t accomplish the diversity objectives that are often an explicit or implicit goal of going test optional. 
6. More information is better.
7. Everything else we use is bad, so we need tests.
8. Tests measure native ability. 
9. If low-income students don’t take a test because they don’t need it for college admission, colleges won’t be able to find them.

1. Yes, everyone takes the same test. Not everyone has the same opportunity to prepare for the tests. You’re punishing students with less opportunity and rewarding those with more when you require these tests and weight them heavily.
2. You cannot tout the benefits of a test that finds one poor kid in a thousand without talking about the costs to the 999 the test screws over for the reasons listed above in #1.
3. See above. Also, grade inflation is only a problem if you believe high schools are primarily sorting systems for the Ivy League. I tend to think they have other important functions for society.
4. If you had a tape measure that measured two inches too long on one kind of wood while measuring two inches shorter on another kind of wood, you wouldn’t say your tape measure was, on average, very accurate. It’s a bad tool.
5. It’s too early to tell, but it sure as hell looks like it. Some early data suggests that the Highly Rejective Colleges got more diverse in their first-year-student classes during test-optional. And guess what? Despite this, some institutions are going to require it again.
6. Probably. But if we didn’t have a test, and someone proposed one that would cut into real instructional time, would screw over kids with lower levels of opportunity, would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and would give the highly rejective colleges a teeny amount of additional information, would you implement it? Let me be bold and say, “no, you would not.”
7. Yes, everything else is bad, and I’ve acknowledged it. But none of them have the illusion of precision of the “standardized test” that causes people to use them improperly.
8. That’s what Carl Brigham thought. He later retracted, but the idea lives on.
9. This is only true because we allow College Board and ACT to be in the list brokerage business. Shame on us.

So, within a week of the Leonhardt article, there are at least two more, both making use of at least one, if not more, of the nine tropes. I’m sure you’ll see more in the coming weeks.

Read them if you want, but just remember, there is a multi-billion dollar corporation with a product to sell behind the stories. Read them with caution, and with a bit of skepticism due a corporation with the track record of the College Board.