http://www.reuters.com/article/us-college-sat-fbi-idUSKCN112009
I have been glued to this. College Board will be exposed!
Manuel Alfaro now has “Mission to Expose the College Board” GoFundMe page… >:)
Anyone who tutors or studies for this new SAT knows that there are about 3-4 questions on each exam that are moderately to seriously flawed. There is at least one error in the answer explanations, and test #4 has a Reading passage with a typo in it as well (a sentence with no verb). It definitely appears to be a somewhat rushed product that is thus harder to ace.
It looks like CB isn’t too happy with MA for exposing that fact.
Do we need better whistle-blower protections?
Just asking generally - do not know much about what went on in this situation.
Post #4 - good question! Why is the person who exposed the problem being investigated? Seems odd to me.
@skypeme
Could you give more details about some of the errors you have found, including the test and question numbers?
It’s not an issue of errors per se, just the occasional typo (missing verbs on the Reading section, incorrect math in the answer explanations) and questions (especially on the Reading section) whose correct answers are somewhat debatable.
I’ll add page numbers when I get a chance.
A couple of quick examples:
Test #4, Section 1 (Reading), page 679, line 56. The sentence is missing a verb after the comma (“comes” would be my best guess).
Test #4, Section 3 (Math No Calculator), page 769, answer explanation for #11. Should say -49, not -54 (they forgot to add the 5). It doesn’t affect the correct answer, but it’s a mistake all the same.
It’s nothing major, but it’s clear to me these New SAT questions are a bit less polished than usual.
It’s one thing to be a whistleblower (or claim to be a whistleblower), but quite another thing to steal intellectual property.
I will wait to judge until I know more, in particular what he was going to do with the informaiton.
Yes, who knows whether he actually stole anything, or whether they are trying to silence a whistleblower.
The missing word in the reading passage in Test 4 is really egregious. I have never seen anything like that in the older official SAT material. However, errors on practice tests or in answer solutions are less serious than errors on real test questions, since only errors on real test questions affect the validity of scores.
If Alfaro’s claim that CB short-circuited the question vetting process is true, then it is likely there were multiple problems with questions on the real tests. I don’t see how anyone could demonstrate this without reproducing the erroneous questions (the intellectual property). I would call this unauthorized use of intellectual property “stealing” if the person sold the intellectual property or made money from it in some other way. If the person uses the intellectual property only to show governmental agencies (e.g., state governments) that the questions have errors in them, I would call this “whistle-blowing” and not “stealing”.
I think that If Alfaro’s goal were to make money with CB intellectual property, he would have proceeded in a completely different way.
Does CB get carte blanche to do whatever it wants, or does the public have an interest that should be defended?
@Plotinus - there were some things like that in the old CB Online course–there was a passage from a pre-2005 reading section, for instance, with the final paragraph removed but they kept a Q that required info from that graf to answer! But yeah, these tests are a mess, and the KA stuff, in particular, is laughably bad in places and far, far worse than anything the CB has put out under its aegis before.
I wouldn’t argue that you have to steal any non-published SAT questions to come up with examples of bad ones. All you have to do is take a look at the 6 tests that have been released so far. It’s just that the worst questions are the “judgement call” ones such as the Reading / Writing and Language questions. The math questions, as usual, are more definitively and defensibly correct. When I take the test, I find that all the questions are relatively easy, but that I might make a careless mistake or two on the math, and that I may disagree with the correct answer to 2 or 3 of the verbal questions.