College Board is doing it again

We shouldn’t be surprised. But before I tell you what they’re doing again, let’s remember what they did.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, College Board moved to a 45-minute, online AP exam. It was a time of great stress and uncertainty, of course, and with regard to logistics and mechanics, they had no choice but to scramble. But in doing so, they did two other things that were completely consistent with their mission to generate as much cash as possible: First, they announced that colleges would accept the new, 45-minute exams just like they did the traditional, much longer exams.

The only problem with that was that they failed to ask the colleges. Oh, sure, they asked a few of their super fans if it would be OK, and the superfans said, “Sure! No problem!” (I did want to ask the faculty senates and other bodies at the institutions where the super fans worked if they had checked and gone through regular academic channels to get things approved, but I thought the better of it.)

This evil, yet ingenious strategy made the colleges the bad guy: If we wanted to insist on validation studies, or other assurances that College Board was certain the new tests were equivalent, or god forbid, if we wanted to say, “Nope, no way we’re going to take those,” it seemed like we were being unreasonable. And being unfair to students.

They also had trustees and other super fans make a video to remind students that it was their duty, their obligation, and their responsibility to take the exams. Because, of course, we’re talking real money here. Never mind the the students’ worlds had been turned upside down and moved online by COVID. Nope, not the College Board’s problem.

What they’ve done here, of course, is to take the concern other people have for students, and leverage it to get what they want. A sociopathic and narcissistic organization considers its own needs to be its top priority, and by wrapping those needs in a layer of artificial concern for students, they take advantage of people who have, you know, actual feelings.

They’re doing it again with testing centers on the west coast, which are in short supply given that until a few months ago, no public university west of the Mississippi required the SAT, and the public universities in California won’t even consider it. High school counselors have been asking College Board to add testing centers and/or dates, to no avail.

You could perhaps forgive College Board, if you believed for one second that they woke up one Sunday morning and learned about Dartmouth going back to the SAT requirement by reading the New York Times like the rest of us did. But I had heard about it a month before via rumblings in the admissions community. And I strongly suspect College Board research heavily influenced the decision, and in fact, I think there is a good possibility College Board staff helped with analysis of the data. (This is just my opinion. I have no proof of this, so call off the lawyers.) The language in the announcements from Dartmouth, Yale, Harvard, et al, just sound too much like presentations made at other universities like Purdue when test-optional admission was under consideration. It was only later that a potential conflict of interest was revealed publicly and the information presented was re-examined (however, Purdue still requires the SAT or ACT.)

Anyway, there is, in my opinion, no reason the College Board should not have seen an increase in demand for testing centers coming, and planned and prepared better for it. It’s Supply Chain 101, and you’d think their president would have learned about such basics in his time at McKinsey, a job he took after he couldn’t get a teaching job.

What I saw today, and what I’m hearing publicly is that high schools are now caving, and beginning to offer themselves up as testing centers. This is great, of course, for College Board, but not always so great for the volunteers and underpaid proctors who have to give up their Saturday; or to students who have to give up instructional time if there is a school day offering. The needs of the College Board come first. If you genuinely care about students, you have to take matters into your own hands.

And I don’t suppose I have to tell you which schools are the ones that are likely to get the most pressure from parents to solve this College Board problem, do I? It’s the parents of the kids who already have a lot of advantages in the admission process.

They did this before, too, of course, in May of 2020, when they posted this:

As I wrote last year, College Board is a business, and the sooner we start thinking that way, the better off we’ll all be. And, as a business, they seem to be doing fine. As a not-for-profit business, they’re doing just great, as evidenced by their most recently available form 990 Tax return. You can see the whole thing here or just look at the snippet, below.