^ It will be unfair for the strong students in the 25 min rooms. The strong students can solve all questions without the extra 5 minutes. Giving extra 5 minutes would help some weaker students solve all questions too.
Maybe the SAT can be normalized for race? Class? Gender? What you ate for breakfast that morning? If the person testing next to you forgot to put on deodorant? Maybe we can standardize the college admission process so that every kid gets into the exact college they deserve? A utopian vs dystopian YA novel series is the only solution to this mess.
Kidding, mostly. My daughter took it Saturday for the first time as a rising Senior. We had hoped it would be her last. Bummer.
You are right, Coolweather. It would be unfair for the strong students in the 25 minute rooms–that is true. Giving the extra 5 minutes would help some weaker students get a perfect score also. They will know after they do the norming how statistically significant that is. I cannot imagine what could be done about that–but I am not an expert in statistics. We need a good statistician on this chat room board! It’s fun to complain, but it is really more fun to look for a fair solution. Let’s do that. I hope College Board can come up with one.
Good summary of the situation and possibilities. (Ignore the advertising at the end.)
http://blog.prepscholar.com/college-board-mistake-june-6th-sat-heres-what-will-happen
@izasaix - " I worked so hard studying for this SAT and I didn’t study at all for my last one! If they try to compare my 1000 pt score difference…ugh;"
If you read my post above they always look at your previous scores when equalizing. and if you really were to have a 1000 pt difference you would be flagged and most likely have to take it again anyway. I think even a 300 pt difference can sometimes cause a test to be flagged.
I think that the 20 minutes kids scores will be left alone. What they do with the 25 minute kids … I don’t know… I think it will depend on how many actually got the 25 minutes. If it’s a lot then maybe it will be ok. But if most kids had only 20 minutes then the 25 minute kids scores maybe hard to normalize.
I think they have other test administrations where they have to normalize smaller pools. For example, if people sign up to take the SAT on a non-Saturday date for religious reasons, that is a smaller pool, and I bet they don’t get the same test because the risk of administering the same test on different dates could make the risk of cheating very high. So if they can normalize pools for non-Saturday test administration, and that is a different test, they should surely be able to normalize the pool of kids who got 25 minutes. All that really matters is that they truly can identify who got 25 minutes and who didn’t. I’m not sure they can do that, but if they can, they can probably solve this problem fairly. The very cool thing is that if they can truly identify who got 20 minutes and who got 25, they can also compare the score distributions for the 25-minute kids to those who got 20 minutes, and see if the distributions are the same. That would tell them if they have an accurate result or not, I think (again, no expert in Stats, here!).
@MichiganGeorgia The 20 minute kids could argue they felt psychologically distressed by the chaotic nature of the situation and its uncertainty, and did not find the testing conditions “appropriate”.
@BenzeneRings - Then the college board should allow any kids who feel they were disadvantaged by the testing conditions to cancel their scores. However I think it’s more likely that most 20 minute kids weren’t affected until after the test was over and the rumors started fly about all the scores being cancelled…
Maybe they could offer an cancellation option to all the kids after they see the score they got?
@MichiganGeorgia I have to disagree. My daughter was in a class where they were given 20 minutes fore each section, 8 and 9, but there was so much confusion in the class between the students and the proctor, and people walking in and out trying to resolve the confusion that it was far from the idealized standard testing scenario. She does feel that she did fine on those sections, but can easily see how the person sitting next to her was all flabbergasted by the situation as it happened.
They could and should certainly offer a test score cancellation and retake to those who thought they were disadvantaged. They also need to offer at least one additional test date to make that happen, as the Fall date for many rising seniors is needed for Subject Tests. My daughter was also distracted by the student behind her arguing with the proctor during the test, and while she would not want her score canceled as a result, others might.
Whatever Collegeboard does will most likely affect everyone whether they had 25 minutes or 20 minutes. They don’t really have a sure method of finding out every student that got extra time. So its logical option is to cancel these scores and schedule a retake for EVERYONE over the summer.
For those who say that the rooms with 20 min time limits will have scores that (should) stand, what about the kid who justifiably thought that he/she had 25 minutes, but got caught short when it turned out that they had only 20 min?
There is no way that the College Board can compensate for every possible permutation of circumstances and events and kids (strong vs. less-strong). They have to toss these two sections. Absolutely no alternative. Anything else is unfair to somebody.
They can’t just toss those two sections. Students may feel that they did better on those sections than others and it may have boosted their overall score. If you take that away it may lower their scores. So the only sure way to keep the test fair to everyone is to do a retake of the entire test.
They cannot just toss two sections. That would create very unfair weighting of the earlier sections. There is room for subjective and individual experiences to be taken into account–they can offer kids a chance to retake the test if they felt their test-taking atmosphere impacted their test. Nobody would know that better than the kids themselves. For the kids who didn’t have a problem, there is no reason their scores can’t stand. There are certainly enough of them to have a national norm.
I agree they should offer another test date in the summer for retakes. Many kids will argue they can’t do it because they are out of town, but they will need to figure it out. There are enough kids impacted that I suspect camps etc. will have to offer testing sites.
This would make a really good AP Statistics question.
@HardworkingMom I agree with you up until the point where you said “they can offer kids a chance to retake the test if they felt their test-taking atmosphere impacted their test”. The problem with this is that students can easily lie and say that they need a retake even though they may not have been affected by this error. There is no way to justify what they say. So the only ABSOLUTE way to make it fair for all students is to offer a retake for EVERYONE.
They could OFFER everybody a retake. REQUIRING a retake, however, would be a mistake. There would inevitably be people who planned the timing of this test very carefully, for whom the retake date is not an option, and some who will be sick on the retake date or have other circumstances that preclude it. There are lots of kids who were really not impacted by this, plenty to make up a national norm. Let those who want to retake it do that. Not everybody should HAVE to do it.
Yes, that would be the right thing to do.
No matter what they decide, there will be unhappy people. There will be kids who got the extra time but didn’t use it, kids who thought they had 25 min as indicated in their booklets who were stopped at 20 min, etc. I think the only thing that they can do to level the playing field is to throw out the scores and give the test again in a couple of weeks. Unfair to a lot of students? Yes, but I can’t think of another way to fix it. And now that this has made the news-- I just heard it on the radio-- it’s only a matter of time until colleges look at scores from June 6 differently than those from other dates (as in s/he did better than the last time-- must have had the extra time). They shouldn’t wait until October, because kids will have to prep again and may be planning SAT2 and/or ED. They need to do it now.