<p>Old SATs crop up again -- but it's not error by test-owners
POSTED: 7:51 p.m. EST, January 30, 2007
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(AP) -- A possible security breach on the SAT exam in South Korea is highlighting a common but little-known practice by the College Board: reusing entire SAT exams that have already been given.</p>
<p>At least one student who took the exam Saturday had access to the questions ahead of time, according to the Educational Testing Service, which writes and administers the exam for the College Board and is investigating.</p>
<p>Actually, hundreds of thousands of people had already seen the test. The SAT exam administered worldwide on Saturday was identical to the one given in the United States in December 2005.</p>
<p>However, the exam was not supposed to have been publicly available after that sitting. The Korean student appears to have seen a portion of the 2005 test without realizing it would be repeated, an ETS spokesman said.</p>
<p>The College Board has a long-standing practice of recycling not just individual questions but entire exams. Three tests administered in late 2004 and 2005, as the SAT was transitioning to its new format, were repeats from recent years, according to Steve Quattrociocchi, head of the test-prep division at The Princeton Review.</p>
<p>The ACT, the country's other major college entrance exam, declined to comment on its policy for reusing entire exams, but Quattrociocchi says it does the same thing.</p>
<p>For some experts and testing critics, the practice raises questions about security and fairness.</p>
<p>"In this environment, when everybody's talking on the Internet and taking test-prep ... you would think if they wanted to make the test as fresh and new and uncorruptable as possible, they would release a new test every time," Quattrociocchi said.</p>
<p>The exam has hundreds of questions, and the College Board has said there is little or no advantage for students taking an identical exam. So it reuses some exams to keep test-development costs -- and prices for taking the exam -- down.</p>
<p>There are seven tests given each year. Of those, four exams are made publicly available afterward, ETS spokesman Tom Ewing said. Those exams are never reused.</p>
<p>But the other three are candidates for reuse. ETS says test books are carefully collected after those exams. But since the recycling practice is well known in test-prep circles, the questions on these exams are like gold to test-takers and tutors.</p>
<p>"Certainly there are students who keep their booklets," Quattrociocchi said. Regardless, test-prep companies can practically reassemble them. While he says Princeton Review does not collect full copies of the copyrighted exams, it sends students and employees to take the test each time it's offered and report back. An hour after Saturday's exam, he said, the company had figured out the exam was a repeat.</p>
<p>"Test-prep companies are all over these tests," he said.</p>
<p>Most students took the exam Saturday probably weren't among those who took it 13 months ago. But Quattrociocchi says he believes thousands of students would have taken the exam twice, including students taking an early stab at the test as sophomores and again as juniors, and current seniors applying to schools with late deadlines. ETS wasn't immediately sure what the number of repeat test-takers was.</p>
<p>Any edge is helpful, especially for students trying to earn a score that qualifies them for a scholarship. But students who can afford expensive test-prep classes may benefit most from the practice, by getting drilled on more of the questions they'll see on the real test.</p>
<p>Having seen exam questions before "gives certain kids ... a tremendous advantage both practically and psychologically," said Bob Schaeffer of the group FairTest, an SAT critic.</p>
<p>Ewing, the ETS spokesman, said some portions of the exam must be kept consistent so that the scores equate from year to year. But it takes 18 months and "probably $350,000" to create an entirely new SAT. The test already costs students $41.50.</p>
<p>But some critics say the practice amounts to cutting corners. The College Board, a not-for-profit that promotes college access, took in nearly $500 million in total revenue in 2004, the year of its most recent publicly available financial disclosure form.</p>
<p>More than 4,000 SAT exams taken in October 2005 were initially scored incorrectly by a College Board subcontractor, an error blamed on technical problems caused partly by humidity.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, there was also a problem with the Medical College Admission Test administered on Saturday, involving a question that was administered to about 800 test-takers. A reading passage about robotic fish was followed by unrelated questions about songbirds.</p>
<p>The Association of American Medical Colleges, which oversees the MCAT, said responses to that question would be thrown out and students' scores would not be affected.</p>